DigitalHobbit

As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails.

MacPorts

In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a [...]

I’ve been working with Ruby (mostly Ruby on Rails) for over a year now, both at work and at home, but I still haven’t settled on a Ruby IDE or editor. Most of my development is done in Linux, but lately I’ve started working in Mac OSX, as I have recently adopted an old PowerBook [...]

I’ve been meaning to post some sample code for a while, and I always wanted to have a nice WordPress plugin to perform syntax highlighting of code. A cursory search of the WordPress website brought up this page, which lists a bunch of syntax highlighting pluging. However, it appears to be a bit outdated, and [...]

Earlier today, David Heinemeier Hansson posted on the Ruby on Rails weblog regarding an urgent Ruby on Rails security patch (Rails version 1.1.5 ). No detailed information regarding the nature of the vulnerability was mentioned in the post, but it does sound very serious.

Originally all Rails versions starting at 0.13 were supposed to be affected, [...]

I just found this very nice Ruby on Rails reference. Both a 33-page PDF version and an even nicer HTML version with colors and syntax highlighting are available.

Geoffrey Grossenbach recently posted two excellent articles on using and implementing Rails plugins:

Complete Guide to Rails Plugins, Part 1 Complete Guide to Rails Plugins, Part 2

Extreme Programming advocate Ron Jeffries recently posted a very good article on the Impact of Overtime on Productivity. Among many other good points, he lists the following indicators that things might be going wrong. I am sure some of these will look familiar to many of you…

Is the ratio of test lines to code lines [...]

gotAPI.com provides a very nice collection of reference documentation for various languages and technologies, including HTML, CSS, Ruby (incl. Rails), Java, various Java APIs (Struts, etc.), MySQL, Ant, and more. Very handy!

In my spare time I’ve been playing with Rails for a while now. This week I tried using SwitchTower and ActiveRecord Migrations for the first time, and I’m very impressed.

Migrations provide a way for versioning and applying database changes. A simple call to script/generate migration MigrationName generates a new blank migration file with the appropriate [...]

The Pragmatic Programmers have published another Ruby book: “Learn to Program”, by Chris Pine. The book is intended for new or non-programmers and teaches programming from the ground up - variables, flow control, and everything. It’s nice to see Ruby move even more into the mainstream, and this book looks like a great introduction for [...]

Koders is a very cool source code search engine. It indexes many open source projects and covers a wide range of programming languages, including of course Java and Ruby, but also more obscure languages. Clicking on a search result brings up a very nice syntax highlighted version of the source code. Many elements in the [...]

Ruby on Rails 1.0 was released today. David Heinemeier Hansson sums it up well in his blog. At this opportunity, a completely revamped Ruby on Rails website was launched as well.

Congrats to David, the Rails Core Team, and all other contributors on this major achievement! Even though the changes from the recent 0.14.x releases were [...]

RubyForge now supports Subversion as an alternative to CVS. If you are looking for a host for an open source project, RubyForge is a great choice (and almost the de-facto standard for Ruby projects), and Subversion support makes this even better. Nice!

Why the lucky stiff, who brought us the fabuolous “Why’s (poignant) guide to Ruby”, just released this new awesome web application:

Try Ruby

Try Ruby is a web based, interactive Ruby tutorial, sort of like IRB on steroids. If you are curious about the kinds of things newbies and script kiddies are trying out in the console, [...]

It sounds like a new book might need to be added to the list of must-have Ruby books: “Enterprise Integration with Ruby”, written by Maik Schmidt and published as a Pragmatic Bookshelf title, is currently in beta. As with all Pragmatic Bookshelf titles, you can purchase the beta PDF now and receive the full PDF [...]

Here’s one way to compare the Ruby and Java technology stacks.

(via the Ruby on Rails Blog)

Update: Here’s the true origin of this comparison.

Recently I’ve been using YAML files along with some Ruby scripts as a simple and convenient mechanism for importing content into our database. The YAML files will be maintained by content authors, and one of the questions that came up is that of validation.

Luckily, there’s a very nice solution in form of Kwalify, a small [...]

The last time I mentioned the RDT (aka RubyEclipse) project about two months ago, I thought that development on this otherwise promising project had stalled. Since then I’ve started lurking on the RDT development mailing list, and I was happy to notice that the project appeared to be picking up speed again. The developers are [...]

I generally try to stay away from writing GUI applications and focus on server side development instead. Still, every once in a while I have an idea for a GUI tool that I’d like to build. My previous post on the upcoming Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby book prompted me to (once again) look into [...]

Dave Thomas just announced a new Pragmatic Bookshelf series called Pragmatic Fridays. I have no idea what inspired the name “Friday” in this context, but a Pragmatic Friday is a short (60 - 100 pages), low-cost ($7.50 - $10), and focussed book on a specific topic. The books are available for download in PDF form [...]