Blog Profile / Ruby Inside

The Heroku & IndexTank “Build A Search-Based Webapp” Holiday Challenge

The Ruby Community’s Christmas Releases

Christmas is a special time for Rubyists and not only for those of us taking the opportunity to get drunk and eat a lot. December 25 has been a popular release date since Ruby 1.0 was released on December 25, 1996 and several developers were preparing releases of their libraries and Ruby implementations this year too. So what December 25, 2010 bring?

Rubinius 1.2 Released: A Blog, Better Documentation and More of a Good Thing

Three months on from the 1.1 release, Rubinius 1.2 has hit the streets bringing together 242 commits from 10 developers. As well as the typical bugfixes and performance tweaks that come with any implementation update, 1.2 brings some...Show More Summary

A Review of ‘The Rails 3 Way’ by Obie Fernandez

The Rails 3 Way is the much awaited, Rails 3-focused followup to The Rails Way, a popular Rails book (and, dare I say, bible) by Obie Fernandez. It features forewords by David Heinemeier Hansson and Yehuda Katz and checks in at a desk-thumping 759 pages of full-on Rails 3 goodness (despite the book sites claiming 850 pages). I've given it the once-over.

Cool.io: Node.js-style Event Driven Awesomeness for Rubyists

Been missing esteemed rapper and author Coolio (real name Tony Arcieri) recently? He's been busy studying Ruby and building Cool.io (or GitHub repo), a Node.js and Sinatra inspired "event framework" for Ruby powered by libev. Think EventMachine but with a cuter, Sinatra-style API. Show More Summary

Ruby in 2010: A Retrospective of a Great Year for Ruby

As 2010 comes to a close, I've dug through Ruby Inside archives to remind myself how far the Ruby scene has progressed over the year. Over the past couple of years, it's been hinted that the pace of developments in the Ruby world is slowing down, but nothing could have been further from the truth in 2010 (well, except in September..)

MacRuby 0.8 Released (and 2 Forthcoming MacRuby Books)

MacRuby team lead and Apple employee Laurent Sansonetti has unveiled MacRuby 0.8, the latest release of the Ruby 1.9-compatible Mac-focused Ruby implementation. The main MacRuby site hasn't been updated at the time of writing but you can get MacRuby 0.8 now from the MacRuby files folder or direct at http://www.macruby.org/files/MacRuby 0.8.zip

PeepCode Releases The “Meet Rails 3? Screencast Series

Ruby screencasting supremo Geoffrey Grosenbach has unveiled PeepCode's new Meet Rails 3 series. There are two parts so far, clocking in at 75 and 92 minutes respectively - they're $12 each or "free" if you have a PeepCode Unlimited subscription.

How to Cure Net::HTTP’s Risky Default HTTPS Behavior

James Golick, a prolific Canadian Rubyist, has declared war on Net:HTTP's default of not checking the validity of the certificate sent by an HTTP server when making HTTPS requests. His new always_verify_ssl_certificates gem forces Net::HTTP to verify SSL certificates and doesn't allow other libraries to override this setting.

Heroku Hits The Jackpot, Sells to Salesforce for $212M: The Community Reacts

TechCrunch reports that Salesforce.com is to acquire the popular Heroku Ruby app hosting service for approximately $212 million in cash. We first posted about Heroku back in November 2007 (18 months before it even went commercial) and since then they've gone from strength to strength. Congratulations to the team!

Salesforce.com Launches Database.com: The First Enterprise-Level Cloud Database?

Many infrastructure companies have recently adopted a drip-feed pricing model - consider renting servers from Amazon EC2 or monitoring our servers with New Relic RPM. The cloud database industry is still in its infant stages but today...Show More Summary

Thanking Ruby Inside’s November 2010 Sponsors

It's time for us to thank the companies who help keep Ruby Inside going by kindly sponsoring our work in return for a little community love. Luckily, they're all interesting in their own right and have some worthwhile products to check out - no CashForGold or dating sites here!

Summarize – Powerful Text Summarization in Ruby

Automatic text summarization is the technique where a computer program summarizes a document. A text is put into the computer and a highlighted (summarized) text is returned. The Open Text Summarizer is an open source tool for summarizing texts. The program reads a text and decides which sentences are important and which are not. Nadav Rotem

Ruby Refinements: An Overview of a New Proposed Ruby Feature

Significant and serious improvements to the core Ruby language come along as infrequently as TextMate updates. Given that TextMate has had an update recently, an important new Ruby feature was sure to be just around the corner and it is: refinements! Shugo Maeda (who works with Matz and developer of mod_ruby) presented the idea at RubyConf 2010 last month.

RubyMine 3.0 Released: An Improved Ruby and Rails 3.0 IDE

JetBrains (of IntelliJ IDEA fame) has today released RubyMine 3.0, the latest version of its cross-platform Ruby and Rails IDE. It follows on almost 18 months to the day from RubyMine 1.0. Back then we noted that the public reception of RubyMine was strong and JetBrains have only made it better since then.

RubyDrop: A Dropbox Clone in Ruby

Ever used Dropbox? It's awesome. A cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, and even mobile) file syncing and backup service with 2GB for free (or 2.25GB if you sign up with this link). Well, if you'd like to roll out your own system on your own infrastructure, send some thanks to Ryan LeFevre, the creator of RubyDrop, an open source Dropbox clone based on Ruby and git.

Is the Ruby Standard Library a Ghetto?

In The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto, Mike Perham argues that Ruby's "standard library" (all the libraries that come by default with Ruby installs) is old and crufty and suggests some parts that should be removed.

Rails for Zombies: An Online Rails Learning Environment

Rails for Zombies is an intriguing attempt to teach people how to use Ruby on Rails directly in the Web browser. It comes from Envy Labs (and specifically Gregg Pollack, once of RailsEnvy fame).

AppSumo: A Discount Bundle of Webapp Credits Suited to Ruby Developers

AppSumo is an intriguing "bad ass developer bundle" that brings together $1543 of credit for ten different Web app development related resources (most are Ruby focused or have Ruby APIs) for a mere $47 purchase.

Practicing Ruby: A Newsletter by Gregory Brown

If you've been following the Ruby scene for a while you'll have heard of Gregory Brown. He's the author of O'Reilly's Ruby Best Practices, creator of the Prawn PDF library, and the head honcho of the Ruby Mendicant University. He does...Show More Summary