A Fresh Cup

In which the intrepid author continues exploring new realms of software.

• Getting into TextMate – Pointers to a bunch of resources for making better use of the TextMate editor. This is one of those tools that I know I will never really master, master-of-none that I am.
• FiveRuns – A Web-hosted systems monitoring solution. This one is built on Rails and features specific monitoring hooks for Rails applications. I know from my time at MCP, though, that this sort of product is a hard sell compared to in-house monitoring solutions; monitoring is not the sort of thing that most IT departments want to outsource.

A couple more things of interest in this new space I’m exploring.

• Rails for Java Developers – The latest from Pragmatic Press. Not being a Java developer myself (and having no ambitions to become one), I’m going to stay far away, but I expect some folks will find it useful. Now, if they publish Rails for .NET Developers I’ll snap up a copy immediately.
• Gyre – “the open source, web-based IDE and debugger for Rails”. Yes, web-based. Looks spiffy, but they caution it’s still very early in the development cycle. (via Ruby Inside)

• One-Click Ruby Installer looks to be the fastest way to get started with Ruby on Windows – installs the language, extensions, an IDE, and a book to get you started. (via Oleg Tkachenko
• Capistrano & EC2 Sitting in a Tree, K I S S I N G includes Rake tasks and a Capistrano deployment file to make pushing a Rails application up to Amazon EC2 servers simple. Looks like a nice automated solution for scaleable rollouts.

Why “Double Shot”? Why not? My daily links column over at Larkware is called “Daily Grind,” so somehow that just seems to fit. Well, at least as much as anything fits.

• Shiny new Subversion and Trac cluster – The Rails team has just gotten a server upgrade, and having checked out a new Edge tree last night, I can confirm that it’s a whole lot faster. There’s also a change of URL for the Rails Subversion repository, though the old URL will continue to work. Here’s some info on switching an existing checkout to point to the new URL.
• Streamlined 0.0.7.1 – I blinked and missed the announcement a few days ago, but the plugin version of this tool for building spiffy Rails views is out now.
• Show database migration versions with Rake – A simple Rake task to pull the current version out of the database. I imagine this could be useful in a busy shop with multiple devs writing migrations.
• Site5 Deployment Problems with Capistrano > 1.2 – A fix to some mystery Capistrano permissions problems. I think it’s a feature, but this could still be pretty helpful if you hit the same situation.
• Getting Started with Subversion on OS X – Ben Wong has some basic information.

• Gardens Point Ruby.NET Compiler New Beta Release – Ruby on the CLR, and they say they’re working on Rails support. Will be interesting to see whether this actually develops. Done right, it’s possible we could end up with some interesting hybrid where Rails projects could scale sideways to leverage the full IIS management infrastructure, but I’d be surprised if an academic project could pull that off. (via Jeremy D. Miller)
• Rails Google Maps Plugin – The basics to using Yellow Maps 4 Ruby . (via dzone)

A few more to pass along this morning before I get any actual work done.

• What’s new in Ruby 1.9, Feb. 07 update – Possibly by the time Ruby 1.9 comes out, I’ll actually know Ruby 1.8 well enough to know which of these are significant. (via dzone)
• Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye – I hate to be mean-spirited, but ComputerWorld’s Scott Finnie is so high profile that it’s hard to resist.
• Converting from Rexml to libxml – Jared Richardson shows how to gain an order of magnitude in XML parsing speed in a Rails application if you need it.

Most of my readers here are, I think, familiar with the Daily Grind postings I do over at the Larkware site, tracking interesting stuff in the .NET universe. While I’m not yet going to commit to doing the same thing over here for the non-Microsoft world, I do have a couple of things bookmarked this morning that are worth quickly pulling together. Who knows, I might do more of these.

• Devalot – New web-based software management tool in Rails. Similar to Trac with more social components. (via Ruby Inside)
• HTML encoding your flash in your controller – Toolman Tim shows how to use the h() method for safely encoding user-entered content in controllers as well as views.
• Ruby and Ruby on Rails Development – Plugin from IntelliJ to turn their IDEA editor into a Ruby and Rails development environment. (via Riding Rails)