Merb, Rails Myths, Language Popularity and other Zenbits

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0 wasn’t even out yet when some people had already started commenting on the...

And the winner is…

A few days ago I announced that I was going to give away a free ticket for the first Professional Ruby Conference, organized by Obie Fernandez and Addison-Wesley, to one of my readers. Each person who took the survey, received a discount code for the conference valued at $200. More excitingly, every eligible participant in the survey was added to a draw for a free ticket. Many replies came in, but of them only 30...

The Rise of the Functional Paradigm

In yesterday’s address to the Ruby community, Dave Thomas invited Rubyists to fork Ruby, to freely research and experiment with new and interesting features. If this process is successful, many of these features will inevitably see their way back into Ruby’s core, thus improving the language in leaps and bounds. And I feel he couldn’t have been any more right. In fact, the whole industry is...

Take this survey and win a free ticket for the Professional Ruby Conference

Addison Wesley will hold their first Professional Ruby Conference in Boston, Massachusetts between November 17 and 20, 2008. This conference, for which Obie Fernandez is the Technical Chair, is highly educational and boasts some of the best speakers from the Ruby and Rails communities. The organizers were kind enough to invite me, offering me a complimentary pass for the Professional Ruby Conference. I won’t...

Benchmarking DB2 pureXML against 1 TB of XML data

Once upon a time there was a Ruby library called Hpricot. Well it’s still here in fact. This library is the de facto standard for parsing HTML in Ruby, and is often used to parse XML as well. Hpricot is normally considered to be quite fast, as far as Ruby libraries go. Yet Nokogiri recently garnered some buzz thanks to a microbenchmark that emphasized its speed over Hpricot’s, when it comes to parsing...

Pygments TextMate Bundle

Following my last post, a few people asked me to create a Pygments TextMate bundle. Ask and ye shall receive (on GitHub). Prerequisites Install Pygments following these instructions. Installation First method: sudo mkdir -p /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles git clone git://github.com/acangiano/pygments-textmate-bundle.git...

Integrating TextMate and Pygments

Like many, I don’t use TextMate just for coding. All of my posts are first drafted in my trusty editor before being published. One of the problems that I had, and that others probably face too, is the less than smooth process of publishing properly highlighted code in posts and HTML pages. A few solutions exist, including embedding gist snippets, using “Create HTML from Document” in TextMate, or...

What Arc should learn from Ruby

There was a lot of buzz surrounding Arc before it was released. Then Paul Graham made an early version available to the public and most people weren’t too impressed. Paul is a charismatic figure and has his own following, so despite the uncertain welcome that the language received, Arc managed to attract a small community of curious developers. Then silence. For a few months, most people hardly heard anything...

Review of the first two Envycasts

The following quiz contains five fairly simple questions about ActiveRecord and Rails 2.2. Try to see if you can answer all of them. 1) What’s wrong with the following (technically valid) line of code? Guide.find(:all, :include => [:user, {:questions => [:user, {:answers => :user}]}], :conditions => "answers.user_id = 42") 2) Having specified :counter_cache => true...

Ruby on Rails at IOD 2008

IBM’s Information on Demand 2008 kicks off in a few days. If you intend on participating, don’t forget to enroll now. For those of you who’ll be attending the event in Las Vegas, I recommend that you schedule in time to check out the session “Putting DB2 on Rails”. This session will be presented by my manager, Leon Katsnelson and my colleague Bradley Steinfeld, and will outline the...

Free version of Ruby in Steel

Later today, SapphireSteel is going to release a free ‘personal’ version of their Ruby in Steel IDE (based on the Visual Studio Shell). This is great news for those of you who are used to Visual Studio and are now switching to Ruby/Rails, or simply for developers who opt to work on Windows (both categories of developers may also be interested in my forthcoming book). This has not been officially...

Django turns 1.0

A couple of weeks ago Django 1.0 was finally released. In the software world version numbers can be rather arbitrary, but this announcement electrified the usually quiet community. Hiding behind the 1.0 label there are thousands of bug fixes, code refactoring of crucial components, compatibility with Jython 2.5, and the addition of impressive features such as GeoDjango which adds GIS capabilities to the...

A status update

More than a month has passed since my last update. Did you miss me? I sure missed you, I truly love you guys. Jokes aside, it was rather uncharacteristic for this blog to go so long without a post, so I feel that a status update is in order before my feed ends up in the Dinosaur reports of your RSS reader. And with humanity facing the imminent threat of the Large Hadron Collider, I didn’t want to be sucked...

Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers available for pre-order on Amazon.com

Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Contrary to what the Amazon page states, the publication date is planned for the middle of December, not January. Similarly, the description is quite messed up and loosely based on the first outline. It almost makes it sound like a book on Ruby as opposed to one on Rails. In reality, only two chapters are dedicated to Ruby, while...

This Week in Ruby (July 26, 2008)

This is the 13th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails. JRuby 1.1.3 has been released. This version includes several bug fixes and major speed and memory improvements. Satish Talim of RubyLearning has announced a new course dedicated...

A close look at three Rails 2.1 bugs

Ruby on Rails 2.1 has been out for six weeks now. Let’s take a closer look at three database related bugs that affect this release. 1. SQLite’s db creation generates false warnings This is an innocuous bug, and if you work with SQLite I’m sure that you encountered and safely ignored it. When you create a Rails application, the default adapter in use is sqlite3, unless you specify otherwise with the...

This Week in Ruby (July 11, 2008)

This is the 12th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails. I’d like to start this edition by apologizing to my readers for the delay in publishing this edition. Things got pretty hectic last week. As far as I know, there are no...

Ruby Shootout Status Update

I want to provide those who are waiting for the Ruby shootout with a heads up. The benchmark suite needs some substantial changes in order to ensure accuracy and fairness for all the VMs involved. This will delay the execution (and reporting) of the shootout further, but it will be worth it. I definitely prefer a shootout that’s published later in July (or heck even August) that is realistic, fair and provides...

Ruby and Rails books, two years later (photo)

Two years...

This Week in Ruby (June 26, 2008)

This is the 11th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. This edition begins with some bad news: Several vulnerabilities that affect the main Ruby implementation have been discovered. There is no reason to freak out, but they are serious. An ill-intended person could take advantage of these vulnerability and execute arbitrary code. Matasano has...