RubyFlow : The Ruby Community Blog

I just published the first article in a series where I implement a Unix shell in pure Ruby code.

This week, the Ruby Rogues welcome a past Rogue back to discuss producing content beyond programming. From newsletters to podcasts, membership sites and video how-tos, Peter Cooper shares his insight on branching out.

We upgraded a couple of our projects to Rails 3.2.0.

In our .railsrc file we had a “show_routes†method, which we used all the time when developing new routes.

But it broke under rails 3.2.0, here is how we fixed it.

If you like the railsapi.com documentation and are sad you can't get the latest Rails docs from it, I've built them for offline use.

It can be tricky to set up a new gemified Rails plugin (with the dummy application) to use Rspec and friends rather than the default test-unit. Here’s how I did it.

RubyMine 4, the latest major release of the intelligent Ruby on Rails IDE from JetBrains, brings significant performance improvements, a brand new UI, improved CoffeeScript and SCSS/LESS editors, and many other features. Read more and download RubyMine 4.

We've just launched Gemfury: Private Gem Server cloud service. If you have packaged some private code into RubyGems, but have had problems deploying them to your hosts, Heroku, or other cloud platforms, I recommend you find out more about us.

I just released ror_ecommerce 1.0.0. I also gave a quick tutorial on how to setup ror_ecommerce on Heroku. Also take a look at the project on github. Enjoy Rails 3.2

Thought, my recent blog post about new go command may be also interesting for the rubyists, check it out here.

Big Fat Rails is my latest project for learning Ruby on Rails. Any feedback on what you think would be valuable for a newbie to learn would be greatly appreciated.

This is my wishlist

We just launched Pelusa, a static analysis tool for Ruby code, and also blogged about it!

I just pushed out version 0.5.0 of viewpoint-spws; a rewrite of the previously named viewpoint_spws library. It allows one to talk to Sharepoint through its web services. There is still a lot that needs to be done but the library allows for some basic List manipulation. Viewpoint-SPWS

A while ago Miso migrated the primary database for our Ruby applications from MySQL to PostgreSQL. Back then, we had published a post explaining PostgreSQL setup and tuning in detail. Today, we published a followup post in the series explaining hot standbys, high availability and streaming replication and detailed instructions on how to set these up for your application.

That's the title of my new post on RubyFleebie. It's about the not so obvious things that capistrano does when you type cap deploy in a rails 3.1+ app.

I just published an article titled SOA for the Little Guys. It covers breaking apart a monolithic app into services with testing and Sinatra as the driving forces.

Ruby nested hash trickery helps visualize a network using Neo4j and the Cypher language.

Your Rails app deserves to benefit from the faster loading performance brought by Ruby 1.9.3!
This post explains how to successfully install Ruby 1.9.3 on Mac OSX Lion, via RVM.

Check out this week's internal talk slides at Codegram (taken from our blog):
Basic Chrome Extensions: Marc Divins introduced us to the creation of some extensions. Warning: Intense trolling ahead!
Object Oriented Nirvana: Oriol Gual refactored some of our Spinach codebase by applying some Object Orientation's best practices taken from The ThoughtWorks Anthology

Last weekend, I won 1st place at the 2012 API Hackday NYC with my submission Spotify Water Cooler. It is a Spotify playlist manager that interacts with Spotify playlists (intended to be played on a shared space/office computer blasting Spotify). The water cooler bit refers to a simple non-persistant web chat as well as the awesome Twilio Client API integration for a voice chat from the browser. The app was built with Sinatra. Enjoy!

Rails provides helper method time_ago_in_words to calculate the time distance, but it's not good, we should use client side solution instead, Not use time_ago_in_words

It's time to turn the task of making a schedule for the business folks into a time to Justify TDD/BDD & Technical Debt. Too often we just give a time based schedule. Spend less time on your schedule and more time justifying Best Practices. Flip what you hate doing into a meeting about what you love.

MailCatcher has been around for a while now, but there's been numerous updates, so definitely worth a look if you haven't started using it in development.

MailCatcher – a super simple SMTP server that intercepts email for testing

I just wrote a blog post about application deployment with Vlad.

Split, the Rack Based AB testing framework, has just been updated to 0.3.2 and it now handles redis errors and downtime gracefully.

Rubygems - Changelog

As much as we’d prefer to just deal with nicely formatted data; the real world sometimes requires that we parse weird date/time strings. Learn how to parse dates and times using strptime and turn those weird strings into actual DateTime objects.

We're pleased to announce the official 1.0.0 release of Spree Commerce. Spree is a 100% open source e-commerce platform for Ruby on Rails. If you haven't tried Spree yet (or if its been a while since you last tried it) head on over to spreecommerce.com to find out more.

I just pushed out version 1.1.0 of the Ruby GSSAPI library.
Changes include:
* cleaner loading of MIT or Heimdal libraries (your choice)
* Added support for Ruby 1.8.x because of requests to do so.
* Some minor fixes and improvements to the Simple wrapper
* additional examples

This week the Ruby Rogues welcome their guest Rogue, Bryan Helmkamp, to discuss code metrics, what that is, and tools and services to derive and report that data in a number of useful (and some scary) ways.

A brief tutorial on adding optional anonymous blocks as function arguments.

RedStorm v0.4.0, the JRuby integration & DSL for the Storm distributed realtime computation system, has been released to Rubygems. It includes Storm 0.6.2 and JRuby 1.6.6 compatibility.

I just released new article introducing new RefineryCMS engine generator features on my Retro Rubies blog. New major Refinery version will be released soon. So if you want to keep in touch, you can discover new features right now.

In this post, a few Ruby on Rails developers and experts share their trend predictions in Ruby on Rails development in 2012.

I just wrote an article about project name SEO.

Ruby naming convention told Ruby developer to name everything with underscore. So every developer names their projects with underscore.

But it’s a giant SEO mistake: Search Engine treats snake_keywords as CamelKeywords. If your project’s name contains meaningful keywords, it won’t be matched. Because “snake_keywords†means “SnakeKeyword†not “snake keywordsâ€.

I have just completed version 1.0.0 of Mongoid::Token - a little library for generating short, unique tokens for your mongoid documents. Great for keeping your URLs nice and short.

With all the talk about putting models on a diet with DCI, I thought I'd write about how I used the Command Pattern to achieve similar goals in my aptly-named turn-based strategy game Elite Command.

Enabling RESTful API access for Rails application is easy. However, the complexity arises when some responses are expected in xml format and JSON format. Complexity increases manyfold when these API calls need authentication. Sethu explains how to use Rabl and Devise for designing your API access.

For the last week or so, I've been trying to build a framework which does for email what Sinatra/Rack have done for web application development. It's not nearly production ready, but Newman now has good documentation of its implementation, and I'd love to hear what people think of it. I could really use some help, since email is not something I'm an expert on.

Many people have been wondering the proper way to inject Roles into Data objects with DCI. I tackle this topic in DCI Role Injection in Ruby.