MrJaba's Adventures

Josh Susser also released a blog post on one of the smaller changes in Rails 3.2.0 that he made. Association methods are now included via a module. What does this mean? Well it means you can override the methods much more easily and still access the parents' implementation via super. Currently you have to hack around this with alias_method_chain etc.
http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2012/1/20/modularized-association-methods-in-rails-3-2

http://blog.nodejs.org/2012/01/19/node-v0-6-8/
Node.js got an update on the 19th with a few bug fixes and some version upgrades to core libraries.

http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/
Need a fully managed NoSQL database? Look no further than Dynamo! Finally released by Amazon! Well actually, do look further as there are a wealth of options available. But do check this one out.

https://github.com/charliesome/twostroke
A Javascript implementation in Ruby? Madness. Very cool though, will have to have a good read of the source of this as it looks like an interesting project to learn from.

http://maxdemarzi.com/2012/01/13/neo4j-on-heroku-part-one/
A very interesting series of blog posts on how to create a film recommendation app using Neo4J and hosted on Heroku. Neo4J is an graph database that makes the relationships between the objects, the edges, the interesting part of the data. Not had a use for this yet, but I might have a follow of this series and see what I think.

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/16196616388/factory-girl-2-5-gets-custom-constructors
Factory girl now lets you provide custom constructors for your Objects in factories. I'm in two minds about this, it does fix an issue that has been a problem with factory girl, but on the flip side it could potentially let how you create your objects in code deviate quite wildly from how you use them in tests. Non issue? Probably.

http://rubyheroes.com/
It's Ruby Heroes time again! Vote for all the amazing people in the Ruby community that put their time and effort into making it a better place for all of us.

https://github.com/pda/roflbalt
This is amazing.

http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/01/19/bundler-and-public-applications/
Hongli Lai, from Phusion explains an issue we have when it comes to installing database drivers in our Rails apps, and a proposed solution.

So we noticed a strange bug the other day with one of our Facebook applications, the bookmarks to your applications at the top right of the Facebook page, you know, these ones:

www.playmycode.com/
Really cool site for building HTML5 games in the browser. Write in a Ruby like syntax that compiles to JS. Looks like fun!

http://subinterest.com/rubies-in-the-rough
@JEG2 has his own subscription only blog where he shares his wealth of Ruby Knowledge with us mere mortals. You'd be crazy not to check out the *free* samples he's just released.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/314-pretty-urls-with-friendlyid
Friendly ID is a rather more sophisticated way of providing nicer URL's in Rails. A lot more powerful than overriding to_param.

https://github.com/evanphx/puma
A highly concurrent webserver designed to use all of your CPU cores. To get this to work you'll need to be running either Rubinius or JRuby, but it also claims that it might improve throughput even on MRI due to the way it handles blocking IO.

http://solnic.eu/2012/01/10/ruby-datamapper-status.html
The DataMapper team have released a roadmap of what's to appear in version 2.0. It looks very promising indeed with a nice clean separation of concerns of each layer meaning they can be stuck together and used as a whole, or independently if you so desire.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/12/19/how-twitter-stores-250-million-tweets-a-day-using-mysql.html
Few weeks old this one, but it's a nice little insight into how Twitter stores it's tweets. Rather impressive I must say!

wekeroad.com/2012/01/12/understanding-the-rails-asset-pipeline/
Is Rails 3 too over-enginered? I don't think so, but apparently some people do. Although not the focus of this article, it touches on the topic before giving some nice explanation as to why the asset pipeline is a good thing.

https://github.com/wycats/parsejs
Yehuda has just released an interesting looking Ruby project that parses Javascript and gives you an AST in return for you to play with. Very cool! No idea what I'd use it for, but cool nonetheless.

http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/
Version 1.2.4 of the JS utility library underscore has just been released with a few bug fixes. Complete with a snazzy new look on the website.

http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/01/04/the-big-three-oh/
Delayed Job just reached version 3.0, like 30 in human terms it's a scary milestone for any young project. New features include: Named queues, Lifecycle callbacks, Backend gem dependencies for AR changed.

This update may break your current projects with an UninitializedConstant error; if it does make sure you specify the new gem in your Gemfile: gem 'delayed_job_active_record'

http://brightbox.com/blog/2012/01/04/riak-cluster/
John Leach over at Brightbox has released a guide on how to set up a 4 node Riak Cluster on their new cloud service. They're using it internally as well, so sounds like it's a good option.

http://jonathanleighton.com/articles/2012/announcing-poltergeist/
Rails core member Jon Leighton has just released Poltergeist, which is a driver for Capybara using PhantomJS (a headless browser) as the browser. Sounds pretty handy.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/312-sending-html-email
Railscast on the best ways to send html emails in Rails, with a few helpful tools to make it a little less painful.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/313-receiving-email-with-mailman
Pro Railscast on how to programatically receive email with Mailman, which is an incoming email processing microframework. "Like Sinatra, but for email".

http://tools.percona.com/
A mysql configuration generation wizard. Answer a few simple questions and get your mysql instance configured much more effectively.

http://blog.siyelo.com/machine-learning-in-ruby-statistic-classifica
A simple-ish Machine Learning example built in ruby, to classify news articles. Nicely written code and clearly explained, this a nice read.

http://wekeroad.com/2012/01/03/rails-has-turned-me-into-a-cannibalizing-idiot/
There's been quite a bit of Rails bashing lately, and how we've all forgotten OO and Rails is turning is into incompetent programmers (apparently). Rob Conery puts the world to rights in this excellent and funny blog post.

It's nearly Christmas!!

http://www.mongomodel.org
Another ORM for MongoDB that's designed to be compatible with Rails 3. It just reached version 0.4.3. It looks a lot like MongoMapper, anyone have any experience with it?

http://coffeescript.org/#changelog
Coffeescript version 1.2.0 has been released with a number of fixes. Most notably --watch and --join can be used together!

https://github.com/shutterstock/rickshaw
Interactive real time graphs? Yes please. Check out the examples/index.html to see what it can do.

http://www.therubygame.com/
Saw this on Friday and had to tweet about it. Great fun. Simple problem and see how fast you can get your code to run. It's really interesting to see the number of submissions for such a simple problem. Also funny to see how many people are cheating!

http://riakhandbook.com/
@roidrage has been working on this night and day by the sounds of things and he knows his stuff! Can't wait to read this once my current book backlog has cleared up! Go buy it!

http://browserling.com/ + http://testling.com/
Two nice looking tools to help you with your cross browser testing. Hosted service, but there are free options.

https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger
Slanger is an open source implementation of the hugely popular Pusherapp protocol. Very handy.

http://kyledrake.net/sinatra-synchrony/
Like Sinatra? Like the throughput of Evented webservers like Goliath? This project adds EventMachine + EM-Synchrony to Sinatra and uses Fibers to get the performance benefits of evented code, without the callback hell. Some very nice looking benchmarks for it too.

www.rubyinside.com/video-game-ruby-tutorial-5726.html
Great article on how to get started with jRuby to write a simple game. I'll need some jRuby in my latest personal project so this should come in very handy indeed.

http://weblog.therealadam.com/2011/12/09/why-metaprogram-when-you-can-program/
Metaprogramming is great, but it can be a huge hinderance when learning a new codebase. This is a very handy guide on *when* to use it.

http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2011/12/ruby-on-rest-2-representers-and-the-dci-pattern/
The best explanation of DCI I've seen yet, models become "Fat on Demand". DCI seems to be gaining popularity as we in the Rails community re-discover our OO coding heritage.

Rails 3.2 will ship with a FileWatcher to only reload your application if any of the files have changed. This gist from Jose Valim shows how to hook it into other watching tools such as FSSM.

http://rubymanor.org/3/videos/
The unbelievably excellent Ru3y Manor's videos are up and available for your viewing pleasure. Get a beer and commence the knowledge absorbing.

http://confreaks.net/events/rubyconf2011
Confreaks have also recently released the videos for Ruby Conf!

https://github.com/robgleeson/ed
Interesting project that allows you a certain (small) subset of git commands to be used in a DSL. Could be pretty handy if you want to work with git programmatically.

http://yehudakatz.com/2011/12/08/announcing-amber-js/
So some interesting news, Sproutcore has had a complete re-write for version 2, and a new name. Amber.js. I've not seen anything built with it yet, but the announcement makes it sound pretty interesting.

http://engineering.gomiso.com/2011/12/07/turn-ruby-code-into-simple-daemons-with-dante/
New gem from the chaps at Miso, built to scratch their own architectural itch. It allows for easy and rather flexible creation of daemonized services.

http://www.enlightsolutions.com/articles/whats-new-in-edge-scoped-mass-assignment-in-rails-3-1/
If you don't use protection from mass-assignment, chances are you'll end up in a world of hurt. Rails 3.1 introduced a little feature called scoped mass assignment; this article explains how to use it.

http://christianheilmann.com/2011/12/06/that-javascript-not-available-case/
Love this article. Excellently written on piece on why javascript may not be available and why you perhaps shouldn't put all your application eggs in the javascripty basket.

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/mi80x/give_me_that_one_command_you_wish_you_knew_years/
Very handy thread on Reddit about the commands we all wish we knew, its like having your own personal neckbeard of power.

http://rails-bestpractices.com/blog/posts/30-ann-rails_best_practices-1-6-0-released
Rails best practices gem version 1.6.0 has been released including a few fixes and new features. Check it out if you want to check your application over for best practice support.

https://bitbucket.org/ged/ruby-pg/wiki/Home
the Ruby interface to postgres has just had version 0.12.0 released. Quite a few fixes in this release too.

https://github.com/tchandy/octopus
I only just heard of octopus this week, but it looks like it's been around for a while. It's an AR compatible sharding gem, that has a lot of features, and it's Rails 3 compatible. Supports; sharding, replication with master/slave support with multiple slaves.

https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/0306f82e0c3cda3aad1b45eb0c3a359c254b62cc
@fxn recently implemented auto EXPLAIN logging for slow queries with this commit. It's aimed for Rails 3.2.0, and will be a pretty handy feature once it's released.

http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/12/01/creating-an-api/
@orderedlist just yesterday announced that they had been acquired by github, one of their tools is @gaugesapp which is a great tool for real time web statistics. This blog post explains a little about how they created the API and why it's done the way it is. Some useful knowledge here.

http://movethewebforward.org/
Great list of resources for how to learn about the latest browser based goodness.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/backbone-support
Thoughtbot are doing a lot with Backbone it seems, they have just released a book on their best practices on how to use it, and this code + example application on how to use these patterns.

http://rhnh.net/2011/11/29/datamapper-retrospective
Xavier Shay is a bit of an expert when it comes to Databases, so it's wise to listen to what he says. He's just blogged a retrospective on working with Datamapper and it's pro's and con's.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/305-authentication-with-warden
There was a new pro episode of Railscasts out yesterday about authentication with Warden.

http://benoithamelin.tumblr.com/ruby1line
This is a Ruby translation of the very excellent Awk 1 Liners. Crazy code within!

http://patshaughnessy.net/2011/11/23/finding-your-soulmate-autocomplete-with-redis-in-rails-3-1
A clever looking autocomplete gem that uses redis for super fast lookups. This article explains how to get up and running with it. A future article will explain how the internals work.

http://leaverou.github.com/animatable/
Test page for animatable css properties. Rather cool!

http://pakyow.com/
Pakyow version 0.7 has just been released. If you haven't heard of it (I hadn't), it's a web framework for Ruby that "lets data be data, views be views, and code be code". What that means exactly, I don't know. I'm going to take a bit more of a look at this soon.

http://bitwiseshiftleft.github.com/sjcl/
Need cryptography in your javascript? Stanford have released an open source crypto library to solve that very problem.

http://kresimirbojcic.com/2011/11/19/dependency-injection-in-ruby.html
Think dependency injection is overkill for a Ruby project? Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but this article shows two variants, setter injection and constructor injection. Useful to know.

http://yehudakatz.com/2011/11/19/how-to-marshal-procs-using-rubinius/
Yehuda Katz shows off some more cool features of Rubinius, more specifically, how the internals of Rubinius are exposed into Ruby and how that can be used to marshal Proc's. Make sure you read the comments as well as there is some good debate from JRuby's Charles Nutter about whether this should actually be done.

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2011/11/20/rails-3-1-3-has-been-released
Bit slow to the party with this one, but Rails 3.1.3 has been released with a veritable slew of fixes https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/v3.1.2...v3.1.3

http://rubysource.com/crafting-rubies-best-practices-while-cutting-gems/
Very nice guide on the best practices when making your own gems.

http://blog.codeschool.com/post/13159446212/jquery-air
Codeschool are doing great work on educating software developers with brilliant screencasts and excellent in browser exercises. They've just released JQuery Air for free! So go and give it a go!

http://www.rubyinside.com/the-ruby-standard-library-to-be-converted-to-gems-for-ruby-2-0-5586.html
Nice explanation over at Ruby Inside about why gemifying the Ruby Standard Library might be happening in Ruby 2.0.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8044303/reference-checklist-for-starting-a-new-rails-application
Daniel Kehoe, owner of @rails_apps asked the question "What's your checklist for starting a new Rails application" on SO the other day. Useful info if you're just starting a new rails app.

http://neilmiddleton.com/getting-more-from-your-heroku-dynos/
This is a handy tip to know about. On the new @heroku stack, cedar, you specify a Procfile which lets you choose what processes are running on your dyno. Now this is very useful as it allows you to switch from the default thin webserver to something more unixy like Unicorn.

https://github.com/juuso/BozoCrack
Not really news this, but it's funny. Think MD5 is secure? Well this tiny Ruby script will crack your md5 hash without using barely any of your CPU resources! How? Google.

http://avdi.org/talks/confident-code-rubymidwest-2011/
Links to a video and slides from @avdi's talk on "Confident Code" at Ruby Midwest. I've not watched the talk, but the articles he links to are really interesting. Definitely check this out.

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/
Not the usual sort of think I link to, but a really interesting read nonetheless! Think your iPhone is the future of how we interact with devices? Read this :)

http://coffeescript.org/#change_log
Coffeescript hit version 1.1.3 a few small fixes here and there. A nice one is that there is effort going into keeping the outputted Javascript readable.

groups.google.com/group/thinking-sphinx/browse_thread/thread/e4530bd56c849253
@pat has written a quick note on the Thinking Sphinx mailing list about some big upcoming changes. Make sure you read this is you use the repository in your Gemfile.

https://github.com/bradphelan/jasminerice/
Some of you may have seen me ranting last week about getting Jasmine up and running. We had a bit of a tricky case: Rails 3.1, Coffeescript + Backbone.js and it was a bit of a pain to get started with. Jasmine Rice took away most of that pain, insofar as it actually worked as advertised. I've still yet to get it running headlessly.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/thin-ruby/YSz3xZQr9qI/575jtZMPtb0J
Thin webserver hit version 1.3.0 with a few changes. Hit the link for the change log.

https://github.com/flyerhzm/rails_best_practices
The Rails Best Practices code metric tool just reached version 1.3.0 as well (coincidence eh?). This tool will tell you where and how often you are using non standard methods. Handy.

http://simsalabim.github.com/sisyphus/
Relatively new little javascript library to persist partially filled in forms, like Gmail and restore them when the browser is re-opened. Handy.

http://subinterest.com/rubies-in-the-rough
@JEG2 has recently started a Ruby Publication, 3 times a month for $6. I haven't subscribed just yet, but am going to keep an eye on the articles abstracts and see if they're worth reading. Has anyone subscribed yet?

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/OpportunisticRefactoring.html
When do you refactor? As and when you see a problem? Excellent! Carry on. If not, then take a quick read of this article as to why you should.

https://github.com/MagLev/maglev
Wow, Maglev has hit 1.0. What is it? It's an open source implementation of Ruby built atop VMware's Gemstone virtual machine. It was very much hyped when announced due to it's ability to persist objects between VM's. Should be interesting to see how this performs.

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/sass-compass-and-the-rails-3-1-asset-pipeline/
There's been a lot of blog posts lately about the Asset Pipeline and rightly so as it's pretty awesome. However, it's performance in development mode isn't great due to it reloading the entire Rails stack on each asset request. This article has a lot of detail about the pipeline, but the development section is very handy indeed.

http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com/2011/10/month-with-chef.html
Long blog post written by Bryan Berry on his first month with chef. I haven't read this yet, but it looks like a good, well detailed read. One that will hopefully shed some light on how you actually use the damn thing :)