A Fresh Cup

Ah, a new work week is always full of such promise, isn’t it?

• “Setting Up Ruby (and Rails) For Ruby In Steel – From Scratch”: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Setting-Up-Ruby-and-Rails-For-Ruby – Step-by-step guide to one easy way to get going with Rails on Windows.
• There can be only one, a tale about Ruby, IronRuby, MS and whatnot – There’s a lot of discussion in the Ruby community these days about the potential impact of Microsoft’s forthcoming IronRuby implementation. This is one of the best summaries I’ve seen.

Time to clean out the links bucket in anticipation of a busy weekend.

• Hackety Hack – Ruby-based take on the idea of a starter’s coding environment for kids. (via Ruby Inside)
• ActsAsSecure – Automatically encrypt specific fields from an ActiveRecord model when they’re stored in a database.
• Compiling RMagick on OS X 10.4.9 Intel – RMagick, or at least its setup, is one of the pieces of the whole Rails story that just seems utterly devoid of elegance.
• Tips for Upgrading to Capistrano 2 – I’ll probably jump in this pond sooner rather than later. One of the nice things about being new to the Rails world is that everything is new anyhow so there’s no special penalty to being out on the edge.
• acts_as_sphinx plugin – Yet another option for full-text searching in Rails applications.
• Rails: Group results by week – This came in handy last night when I needed to do multilevel reporting in a Rails view.

Just a couple of quickies this morning.

• Finding a Ruby IDE – Jim Clark spends time hunting around for a Ruby on Rails IDE for Windows and settles on NetBeans. (via dzone)
• Ruby (and Rails) Books – the essential reading list – A reasonably short list from Huw.

Yeah, I know some readers are showing these twice. I’m working on it.

• Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows – Another programmer’s editor becomes Ruby-aware.
• ActiveMerchant – This Rails plug-in for access to various payment gateways has hit version 1.0.0 (actually 1.0.1 but who’s counting?).

I continue to be amazed at all the things I find on the Web. Fortunately, I don’t inflict most of them on you here.

• Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial – How to set up high-performance text searching in your Rails applications.
• RESTful Rails Development – Tutorial available in German or English; Paypal donation requested if you find it useful. (via Ruby Inside)
• Ruby Implementations Shootout: Ruby vs Yarv vs JRuby vs Gardens Point Ruby .NET vs Rubinius vs Cardinal – Despite the careful methodology and the poster’s cautions, I’m sure there will be plenty of unwarranted conclusions drawn from this study, but I’m linking to it anyhow. Just try to keep in mind the difference between “platform X is slow” and “a particular group’s project on top of platform X in its early days is slow.”

• 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.

• 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.

RUBY-DOC.ORG is loaded with online searchable Ruby documentation. This is very useful when you’re using a Web framework based on a language that you don’t really know yet.

Mike Clark has another interesting post today, Getting Started with the Amazon S3 Library for Ruby , exploring yet another spiffy Ruby library. I continue to be impressed with some of the things that people have wrapped up in small amounts of Ruby code – and happy that I don’t have to cart them all around with me in some super-giant-mega framework when I don’t need them.

Another cool resource: cheat sheets features close to 100 command-line cheat sheets for Ruby and associated coding – the one on Capistrano helped me out immensely tonight, and I’ve got my eye on a couple of others (TextMate for Rails, for example). You can access them all online in HTML glory, or

 $ gem install cheat

will bring it into your local system where you can access the cheat sheets directly from the command line.

RubyFurnace is an online repository for Gems and Rails plugins. There are quite a few there already to browse through. I’m guessing more tools for finding the best and most applicable to your own projects are still to come. (via dzone

Ruby 1.8.5 released!

I don’t know which is more annoying – languages that only rev once every few years, or onces that are in a constant state of ferment so you never quite know where the line is between “beta,” “working,” and “deprecated.”

Refactoring, Ruby Edition is the permanent home for the book project I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Jay Fields is tackling a rewrite of the classic Refactoring book to use Ruby as its language (with Martin Fowler’s permission). Here’s the announcement, and here’s the first example bit.