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This Week's Ruby News - Issue 87

From:  Ruby Weekly <rw-AT-peterc.org>
To:  <lwn-AT-lwn.net>
Subject:  This Week's Ruby News - Issue 87
Date:  Thu, 5 Apr 2012 08:00:39 -0400
Message-ID:  <0618f6a79d6bb9675f313ceb29659df23b6.20120405120028@mail259.us2.mcsv.net>
Archive-link:  Article, Thread

Ruby Weekly - A Weekly Ruby Newsletter
Issue #87 - April 5, 2012


From the Editor's Desk..
------------------------

Welcome to issue 87 of Ruby Weekly! Well I warned last week's Ruby Weekly
might not turn up and.. it didn't ;-) I was in the middle of some pretty
intense travel but I'm back home now. Thanks for your patience.


Headlines
---------

Matz Wins FSF's 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software
https://www.fsf.org/news/2011-free-software-awards-announced

  Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the
  winners of the FSF's annual free software awards recently with Ruby's own
  Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto picking up the Award for the Advancement of Free
  Software. He joins a short list of open source heroes including Alan Cox,
  Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum.

Released: 'The Rails View' by John Athayde and Bruce Williams
http://pragprog.com/book/warv/the-rails-view

  Working in Rails' view layer can be tricky with brittle, complex views all
  too easy to rustle up. This book digs into strategies and approaches for
  upping your Rails view game and breaking free from tangles of logic and
  markup in your views. Two thumbs up.

Ruby Language Accepted As An International Standard by ISO
http://dallarosa.tumblr.com/post/20338743300/ruby-is-acce...

  Dalla Rosa noticed a press release from Japan's IT Promotion Agency which
  notes that the long awaited Ruby specification (not to be confused with
  RubySpec) has been approved by the International Standards Organization as
  the ISO/IEC 30170 standard.

Rails 3.2.3 Released
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/3/30/ann-rails-3-2-3-h...

  The usual laundry list of minor changes but the biggest deal here is the
  default value of 'config.active_record.whitelist_attributes' becomes
  'true', inspired by the recent GitHub mass assignment issue. Note that the
  change only affects newly generated apps but you can learn more in this
  post.

Yehuda Katz Raises $40k for 'rails.app', an OS X Rails Environment Installer
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp

  Just a week ago Yehuda Katz (well known as the lead architect behind Rails
  3) launched a campaign to raise $25k to build a Ruby and Rails environment
  installer for OS X. It has now gone on to raise over $40k but left some in
  the community wondering quite what was really needed.

Rails Drama: Reverting 'Return an actual boolean from xml_http_request?'
https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/3756a3fdfe8d339a53b...

  A revert was made to Rails which took the xml_http_request? from returning
  true/false to returning a value that's 'true or false in the Ruby
  definition of the words.' This turned into the big Ruby drama du jour. My
  take? It ranks up there with the most bizarre commits to Rails but there
  you go.


Reading
-------

Exploring Ruby's Regular Expression Algorithm
http://patshaughnessy.net/2012/4/3/exploring-rubys-regula...

  Pat Shaughnessy, Ruby implementation spelunker extraordinaire, digs into
  Oniguruma, the regular expression engine used by MRI Ruby 1.9. What does it
  do and how does it process your regexes?

Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0
http://patshaughnessy.net/2012/3/23/why-you-should-be-exc...

  Could it be Pat Shaughnessy again? Yes, sirree. Here he digs into the
  'bitmap marking' garbage collection algorithm that promises to reduce
  Ruby's memory consumption in Ruby 2.0.

Using MiniTest::Spec With Rails
http://metaskills.net/2011/03/26/using-minitest-spec-with...

  Ken Collins has been working on minitest-spec-rails, a gem that makes it
  reasonably trivial to use MiniTest::Spec (part of the Ruby 1.9 stdlib) with
  Rails. Learn how here. Ignore the date on this article, it was just
  updated!

Building Backbone.js Apps With Ruby, Sinatra, MongoDB and Haml
http://addyosmani.com/blog/building-backbone-js-apps-with...

  An extensive tutorial by Addy Osmani on building a Backbone.js at both the
  front and back ends. The server side part is powered by Ruby's light but
  powerful webapp DSL Sinatra.

Running JRuby on Heroku
http://carlhoerberg.github.com/blog/2012/03/29/run-jruby-...

Zero to Jekyll in 20 Minutes
http://rubysource.com/zero-to-jekyll-in-20-minutes/

  Jonathan Jackson explains how to use the popular Jekyll blog-focused static
  Web site generator from scratch.

Building and Implementing a Single Sign-On Solution
http://merbist.com/2012/04/04/building-and-implementing-a...

What Would Happen If You Ran 'bundle update' Right Now?
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/20222801236/what-would-...

  Is there a bundle command to tell you what would be updated with bundle
  update, without actually making those updates? With Bundler 1.1.. yes there
  is!


Watching and Listening
----------------------

RailsCasts on Copycopter
http://railscasts.com/episodes/336-copycopter

  Copycopter provides an interface that clients can use to edit the text in a
  Rails application. Learn how to deploy a Copycopter server using Heroku and
  integrate it in a Rails application through I18n.

Building a Ruby Gem - A Tech Talk
https://vimeo.com/39004946

  A 17 minute screencast walking through building a Ruby gem from scratch
  using Bundler and RSpec.

PeepCode Play by Play: Jim Weirich
https://peepcode.com/products/play-by-play-jimweirich-ruby

  PeepCode continues its Play by Play screencast series with Jim Weirich, the
  author of the ubiquitous Rake build tool for Ruby and chief scientist at
  EdgeCase. Want a view over an experienced Rubyist's shoulder? This is a
  good place to go.

Don't Fear The Threads: Simplify Your Life with JRuby
http://www.naildrivin5.com/blog/2012/03/23/slides-from-my...

  An epic 161 slide slide-deck by David Copeland, focused on threading and
  JRuby.


Libraries and Code
------------------

Weary: Framework and DSL for Building RESTful Web Service Clients
https://github.com/mwunsch/weary

  Mark Wunsch's Weary is a suite of tools built around the Rack ecosystem
  that makes it both easy to build elegant clients for (ideally RESTful) Web
  services.

debugger: Port of ruby-debug That Works on 1.9.2 and 1.9.3
https://github.com/cldwalker/debugger

store_configurable: A Hash for Config Options on ActiveRecord Objects
https://github.com/metaskills/store_configurable

  A zero-configuration recursive hash for storing a tree of options in a
  serialized ActiveRecord column.

Proffer: Hide Instance Variables from Rails Views by Default
https://github.com/hudge/proffer

S3itch: Amazon S3 WebDAV Proxy for Skitch
https://github.com/mattmatt/s3itch

  Popular OS X screenshot tool Skitch is dropping its native file sharing
  component so Mathias Meyer has built a Sinatra-based proxy that can accept
  files over WebDAV and then upload them to S3.

rankable_graph: A Ruby PageRank-Like Implementation
https://github.com/cubox/rankable_graph


Jobs
----

Ruby Developer at Decisiv, Inc. [Remote working OK]
http://jobs.rubyinside.com/a/jbb/job-details/664486

Mid-Senior Ruby Software Engineers at FreeAgent [Edinburgh, United Kingdom (Remote poss)]
http://jobs.rubyinside.com/a/jbb/job-details/668885


Last but not least..
--------------------

Cloudinary: Image Manipulation in the Cloud
http://cloudinary.com/

  A lot of webapp developers seem sick of installing things like ImageMagic
  to do image cropping and scaling. Cloudinary adds another solution. It's a
  commercial service but makes it easy to do image manipulations via URLs.

Heroku Add-ons Catalog
http://addons-catalog.herokuapp.com/

  There are lots of add-ons for the Heroku cloud hosting service nowadays but
  Ivan Schneider thought they were hard to scan through, merely being in an
  alphabetical list, so he built a different way to browse them.



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