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Content Tagged with Ruby + tools

Highlighting some issues with the YAML editor that ships with NetBeans 6.1, which make it unusable for any serious YAML development.

Java and Groovy are my main programming languages (as well as JavaScript for scripts in HTML pages) therefore it’s always funny for me to see that HtmlUnit gets used outside my “Java world”.

One of the powerful features added to the NetBeans IDE 6 was support for Ruby, JRuby, and Ruby on Rails. The Ruby programming language has become popular with a growing number of developers because of its simplicity and its productivity features. As is the case for the Java programming language, Ruby is object-oriented, although in Ruby everything is an object -- even what are called primitives in the Java language. Ruby is also open-source and has a large and active community. Ruby's creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, known to the Ruby world as "Matz", intended the language not only to be easy to use and highly productive, but also fun.

RubyFlow - the community based companion site to Ruby Inside - has been on fire! I’m finding out about lots of new stuff on there that then gets included into Ruby Inside posts. It’s the place to be if you want the most up to date Ruby and Rails news, but don’t mind putting up with a bit of ‘noise’.

Every two weeks or so I’m going to summarize some of the best items from RubyFlow here on Ruby Inside, so that you can still keep up with the latest developments even if you don’t want to be soaked in the firehose of Ruby news over there.

For the period April 24 to May 5, 2008:

Net::SSH 2.0 Released: Jamis Buck announces the release of Net::SSH 2.0 and the availability of Net::SFTP 2.0, Net::SCP 1.0, Net::SSH::Gateway 1.0 and Net::SSH::Multi 1.0.

Webistrano 1.3: Webistrano 1.3 has been released; read the announcement. Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

Automatic Migration Generator: Hobofields is an automatic migration generator for Rails / ActiveRecord users. Annotate your model with the fields required as you go, then Hobofields generates the required migrations.

Capistrano 2.3.0: Yehey! Capistrano 2.3.0 is released. It has many new tasty features!

Rails 2.1 Features: A summary of some of the nice new features coming in Rails 2.1. In short, many of the rough spots are being patched over!

Ruby and TextMate: An interesting introduction to TextMate’s Ruby bundle. A good place to start if you use TextMate but haven’t used any of the mnemonics and snippets the Ruby bundle provides (like me).

John Lam on Iron Ruby: A video update on Iron Ruby from John Lam recorded by David Laribee.

MetricFu: Jake Scruggs demonstrates how to use MetricFu to produce good looking metrics and reporting for your Rails application.

Merb Blogging Software: Announcing Feather, a Merb based blogging engine with a lightweight core framework, and a robust set of plugins, now open source and ready for contributions!

Parsing Quoted Strings: If you need to parse quoted strings in Ruby, a lesser-known module called Shellwords from the Ruby Standard Library is a handy utility.

I've been working on Kebima for several months now, using Firefox and Linux/OSX. Chalk it up to not doing enough research, but I just figured transparent PNGs worked in IE. Oh well. They don't. At least not in 6 and earlier. So began my mission to get them to work.

So i’ve spent this week hacking on Rails, specifically going spelunking in ActionPack and porting Merb’s rack machinery to rails. I figure that merb is a very nice experimentation ground and decided it was time to give some love back to the framework that inspired merb.

Following on from this weeks’ launch of Github, it’s worth rounding up some of the best Ruby-related Git content out there.

For those who still aren’t familiar with what it is, Git is a distributed source code management / revision control system. It’s vaguely similar to Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, or Bazaar in terms of managing source code, but with significant differences to all of these in varying areas. If you use any of these systems, however, Git will be of interest to you.

Git Tutorials and Introductions

Git and Ruby

General Git Resources

Git Hosting

Merb is the new cool Ruby Framewok, but is it worth switching yet? Is it really faster than Rails? How much faster?

It’s been the programming world’s worst kept secret, but the covers are finally off as GitHub officially launched today. No more beta invites needed - hurrah!

GitHub is, officially, a Git repository hosting service (where Git is a source code control system - think decentralized, distributed SVN) built by Chris Wanstrath (Err the Blog), Tom Preston-Werner (creator of Chronic and God), and PJ Hyett. GitHub’s early users are calling it a “social programming network,” a “FaceBook for coders,” and all sorts of wonderful things. This is because Git’s decentralized nature makes it easy to fork, branch and merge code, and so does GitHub, which makes GitHub an ideal platform for collectively working on software, especially open source.

As of Rails 2.1 (coming very soon), GitHub will be the new official home of the Rails source repository, and the Merb, RSpec, Capistrano, Prototype and Scriptaculous projects are also on board, along with hundreds of other Git repositories created by beta users.

GitHub is a commercial offering (though from two open source devotees), but with an incredibly generous free level, meaning that the service is free for most reasonably sized open source projects (that is, the free level covers that sort of open use). There are, of course, a wide range of plans available for the whole gamut of users.

If you haven’t yet given Git a go, don’t fear, as a round up of Git tutorials, tips and tricks (with a Ruby slant, naturally) is coming next here on Ruby Inside. That said, I’ve just noticed InfoQ has already posted something similar, so read that if you’re feeling impatient.

Apologies for my low activity on this blog recently. I've been swamped during the NetBeans 6.1 development cycle. The main reason is that I've been completely consumed reimplementing the JavaScript support in NetBeans. It is now built on the same infrastructure as the Ruby editor. It's been quite a sprint to get it done, but we're about to freeze NetBeans 6.1, and it's in. And I think NetBeans now compares quite favorably against other JavaScript IDEs and editors.

Git is becoming one of the most popular source control systems in Ruby community. New blog entries on how to use Git are popping up all over the place and the amount of excitement is just very unexpected. :) Who would have thought that source control tools might be so exciting! Well, here are my recipes on how to use Git with Ruby/JRuby subversion repositories.

Ruby 1.9 Coming To Symbian OS

David Wood talks about the development of a port of Ruby 1.9 for Symbian OS (as used in many portable devices). The port includes TCP/IP and filesystem access, although GUI-level features are expected to be implemented by third party developers if the interest is there. An initial release is scheduled for April 2008. (Thanks to Jose Marinez for the lead.)

Rubyizumi - Open Source Ruby-Powered RMTP Server

The official site says it best: “RubyIZUMI is an open source RTMP Server for Flash Video/Audio Streaming. It is written in (Pure) Ruby and it supports to broadcast MP4(H.264 + AAC).”

Ruby Inside in Indonesian!

The Indonesian version of the official Ruby homepage is now live, and features translations of Ruby Inside posts! If anyone else is interested in doing the same for their own language, feel free. Good work guys.

Ruby-Processing Continues to Evolve

Just a month ago I posted “Using the Processing Graphics System for Ruby” and I’ve had news that thanks to the interest produced by that post, the Ruby-Processing project is progressing by leaps and bounds. Jeremy Ashkenas writes:

The cross-platform issues were hammered out in short order, support for native libraries was added (so now you can use Ruby to write OpenGL visualizations), fullscreen support has been added, and now, today, there’s a new script to export your sketch to an applet. So you can now check out Ruby-Processing sketches in your browser without having to download a thing.

Exhibit A: The WishyWorm demo. Click to toggle translucent backgrounds.

Exhibit B: The Contextual Tree. This one shows off Ruby metaprogramming — it uses a context-free drawing DSL that I’ve been working on. (Which isn’t quite ready for prime time, and so will bork out on you now and again.) Click to generate new trees.

Exhibits C, D, and E: I’ve also exported the other three demos from the Ruby-Processing download.

This is great news for those who want to play with Ruby, generate graphics, and share the results on the Web.

Sun and University of Tokyo Developing Multiple Virtual Machine Environment for Ruby and JRuby

Sun and the University of Tokyo have announced that they’re going to work on developing a “multiple virtual machine environment” for both Ruby and JRuby, enabling multiple programs to run at the same time within the same process. The press release is a month old but skipped my attention as I haven’t found any significant mentions of it anywhere else. Verbatim:

A group led by Professor Ikuo Takeuchi at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo will collaborate with Sun’s Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and the members of the JRuby team to implement a multiple virtual machine (MVM) environment on both Ruby and JRuby. The MVM environment is expected to make Ruby programs run more efficiently than was previously possible. The results of the research are scheduled to be open sourced via the broader community of Ruby developers, which could inspire further innovations.

Previously, running more than one application simultaneously on Ruby required multiple interpreters, leading to excessive memory consumption. The proposed MVM environment could generate multiple VM instances on a single interpreter, allowing applications to run more efficiently. The collaborative research aims to clarify such technical issues as the definition of common interfaces for using MVM, parallelization of VM instances and memory sharing, and then to implement technologies that can be used on Ruby and JRuby. While Ruby has already been widely in use in commercial and other environments, the research on MVM will further enhance the performance and utility of Ruby.

The collaborative research is scheduled to continue until the end of September 2009. For the first year, Sun will contribute funding to the research. In addition to the principal researchers from Sun’s JRuby team and Professor Takeuchi’s group, various other researchers and programmers will be invited to join in this research.

I suspect Rubinius will be a production-ready option by September 2009, but it’ll be interesting to see what Sun and the University of Tokyo come up with.

In my endless quest to get DRY with Radiant, the Rails-based CMS for the new Pathfinder website, I made another exciting discovery last week: Snippets are basically just server-side includes that get interpolated into your pages before Radiant's custom tags are parsed. This means that you can create a snippet to, say, display a bunch of information about a page and then plug that snippet into any number of different contexts.

How to execute your tests from any editor's standard setup with a single key stroke - even when you work with a remote shell.