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Ruby Weekly
Issue #42 - May 19, 2011  Like This Week's Ruby News - Issue 42 on Facebook  share on Twitter

Welcome to issue 42 of Ruby Weekly - let's get straight to it.

Headlines

DHH's RailsConf 2011 Keynote: Asset Packaging in Rails 3.1
On Wednesday, DHH gave a keynote at RailsConf 2011 about the future of asset caching and JavaScript in Rails 3.1. I live-blogged the keynote and you can follow the notes and slides I captured here or, if you prefer, watch the video (47 minutes).

Ruby In Steel 2 Beta 2 Available
Huw Collingbourne has released a new beta of Ruby In Steel 2, a popular Visual Studio-based IDE for Ruby on Windows. New features include JRuby 1.6 and Ruby 1.9.2p180 support. If you're on Windows, it's essential stuff. If you're not, move on..

RSpec 2.6.0 Released

state_machine 1.0 Released - State Machines for any Ruby Class

New Relic Introduces 'Real User Monitoring' - How It Works

Articles and Tutorials

What Gems To Be Using For What Job in Rails 3 Right Now
I had to stick a new title on this post but basically it's a post by Andy Wang of Intridea that shares some current 'best choices' of gems and libraries to use for your Rails 3 apps in areas like authentication, scaffolding, forms, search features, and more. Very useful. For now.

Faster Rails Tests with Hydra (in Ruby 1.8)
Hydra is a distributed testing framework that speeds up your test runs by spreading the load between multiple machines (or even multiple processes on your own machine to use multiple cores). It's Ruby 1.8 only for now though.

Life After Objective C? MacRuby!
iOS developer Jonathan Penn ponders whether Apple is reaching a point where Objective C will be a barrier to introducing more developers to their platform. His theory is that Apple will adopt MacRuby as a 'next step' solution.

Running Rails 3.1 and Sprockets on Heroku Right Now
Gerred Dillon of QuickLeft has been playing with Rails 3.1 and wanted to deploy a Rails 3.1 app (which depends on Sprockets for asset packaging) to Heroku. He hit some trouble (as you'd expect - Rails 3.1 isn't even out yet!) but found a workaround to get things running right now.

Rubinius on JRuby? It Exists.
Yoko Harada melted my brain with this post about running Rubinius on JRuby. Turns out, there's a Rubinius branch of JRuby to do just this and the Rubinius implementations of core classes then overrides the JRuby implementation. This is one for the experimental folks.

What's New in Edge: Scoped Mass Assignment in Rails 3.1
Protecting your attributes from mass assignment (whether by blacklisting or whitelisting) is an important safety feature in your Rails apps. Sometimes, though, you want different rules for different types of identified users. ActiveRecord has been getting exactly that functionality in Rails 3.1.

Yehuda Katz's Ruby Encoding Cheat Sheet

A Crazy Deep Rails 3 + Mongoid + OmniAuth Tutorial/Walkthrough

A Quick Rails Tip: Logging Which Line Called redirect_to

Screencasts

HTTP Streaming by RailsCasts
Ryan Bates presents the latest episode of RailsCasts where he looks at the much awaited 'HTTP Streaming' feature in Rails 3.1 that allows content to go out over the wire before the view is even completely rendered. Trippy.

O'Reilly's RailsConf 2011 Videos YouTube Channel
Highlights include Dr Nic playing the Top Gun theme tune, the handing out of Ruby Heroes awards, and Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson kissing people. Yeah, it's a wacky bunch!

Libraries and code

Active Admin: Gorgeous Admin Interfaces for your Rails Apps
Active Admin bills itself as the 'missing administration framework' for Rails apps. It's basically a plugin for generating administration style interfaces. It's not super new but has been updated recently and has a very compelling promo site.

Middleman: Static Site Generator on Haml, Sass, etc.
The Middleman is an ultra opinionated static site generator (think nanoc or Jekyll) that uses Haml, Sass, Less and CoffeeScript in order to kill 'tag soup' and encourage 'only the cleanest and efficient markup.'

Search Your GMail Messages with ElasticSearch and Ruby
ElasticSearch is an HTTP server version of the Apache Lucene search library (like the more famous Solr). Karel Minarik shows how to tie up ElasticSearch and your GMail account with some Ruby gems and a small Sinatra app to create a locally searchable archive of your GMail messages.

Catch Outgoing Mail (From Your Webapps) with MailCatcher
MailCatcher is a Ruby app designed to catch mail sent via SMTP to a local port (from your Ruby-powered webapp, say) and serve it in your Web browser for easy e-mail testing without doing real deliveries.

html5_validators: HTML5 Client Side Validation for your Rails 3 Models

bluepill: Simple Process Monitoring Tool

Fashion Quest: A Shoes and YAML-based Interactive Fiction Framework

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Polite Agent of Non-Destructive Assimilation (PANDA) [San Francisco, California]
You know Engine Yard, right? Perhaps the top app hosting service in the Rails space? OK. They're looking for a technical liaison between sales, the customer and other parts of the organization. You need some familiarity with Ruby and Rails but it's a position with wide scope for working with customers, creating content, and the like. Sounds fun!

Senior Front End Developer for Proofpoint [Sunnyvale, California]

Senior Developer for Medivo [New York, New York]

Senior Web Application Engineer for StreamSend [Sacramento, California]

Last but not least..

The BEATS Ruby Drum Machine
BEATS is a command-line drum machine - seriously. You feed it a song/beat notated in YAML and it will produce a WAV file based on your input. The way you notate the beats is strikingly straight forward.

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