This Week in Ruby (May 20, 2008)

This is the 8th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments.

Ruby

Yehuda Katz released a couple of “gems” this week: Thor improves Ruby’s support for scripting, and it was created while he was working on a Textmate gem for handling bundles.

You may have heard about the book: The Ruby Programming Language. I found this review to be an interesting read if you are considering purchasing it.

Struggling with regular expressions in Ruby? Now you can use Rubular, an excellent way of editing and testing Regular Expressions in Ruby, so that “you don’t have a new problem”.

If you are one of the developers who prefers Flex to Ajax, then you need to check out Ruboss, a new framework aimed at simplifying the creation of Flex powered Rails applications. The co-author of the framework is also the author of Flexible Rails, a well written book that I’m trying (slowly) to read, even if at this stage I don’t plan to use Flex.

DataMapper continues to gain momentum in the Ruby community, particularly for its usage with alternative frameworks. An article titled Thoughts on DataMapper provides a lot of insight into this enterprise level ORM.

Rails

The big news this week is that Rails is finally on Rubinius. This follows a previous announcement in which the Rubinius team managed to get Merb up and running. Once long ago, at the time of my first shootout when Rubinius was a very young project and performed poorly, I had an email exchange with Evan Phoenix and I told him, “I secretly think that your project may become the most interesting implementation of Ruby.”. I stick to that conviction. As long as they manage to improve performance to the point of being as fast as Ruby 1.9, they have a shot at becoming the most popular Ruby VM. The company that made this possible is Engine Yard, and you may be interested in checking out this interview with their CEO, Lance Walley.

WindCityRails is a one-day (September 20, 2008) not-for-profit conference. There are only 150 places available and these will sell out really fast. Book your sit now, it’s only $99 for a day of fun and coding.

Other remarkable articles from this week were: Chunky Iterator: So You Don’t Have to Load All Your AR Objects at Once, Do we really need Controller and View tests?, Guide to Unobtrusive JavaScript and SWFUpload, Paperclip and Ruby on Rails.

Not exactly published last week, but still worth mentioning is this series of Notes from the Advanced Rails Studio (part 1, 2 and 3).

mod_rails

Dreamhost is now officially on Passenger; this is a major score for the guys at Phusion. They also have a challenge up with t-shirts offered as a prize, for those who can identify the various deployment configurations compared in two speed and memory charts, while testing the blog engine Typo 5.0.3.

This week Geoffrey Grosenbach shared his point of view regarding mod_rails in Ask Your Doctor About mod_rails, while the second part of Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server Using Passenger went up.

It could be said that the Phusion guys are very good at creating hype for their products, but — for now I can’t say more than that — they seem to deliver.