Ruby Inside

Ola Bini (of JRuby fame) is starting a series of blog posts about artificial intelligence programming in Ruby, based off of the landmark textbook "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig (currently the Director of Research at Google). PAIP is a significant work in the artificial intelligence world, and despite being published in 1992 it still has a lot of relevance.

This week you may have heard about "Chrome," a new Web browser being developed by Google (if you haven't, read this online comic book that demonstrates its worthiness). Associated with Chrome is V8, a new open source JavaScript engine that's designed to execute JavaScript code at never-seen-before speeds.

All this reminded Marc-André Cournoyer (of Thin fame) of HotRuby (see previously on Ruby Inside), an experimental JavaScript-based virtual machine that can run YARV-compiled Ruby code, and he set out to test the performance of Ruby…

If you thought August's job post was hectic, this month will blow you away! The focus is still heavily on Rails - and most of these jobs are in the United States (there's one in the UK - keep an eye out for it). The Ruby Inside Job Board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) is the source for most of the positions.

This month's interesting opportunities:

Recently we posted about NeverBlock, a Ruby 1.9-specific library that eases the development of apps that use non-blocking IO. eSpace, the company behind the library, have now come along with another surprise... MySQLPlus - a non-blocking MySQL driver for Ruby 1.8 and 1.9! There's more information here in the official announcement.

MySQLPlus is billed as a new general purpose MySQL driver that supports "threaded access and async operations" and after installing it and running the basic tests that come with the library, it certainly…

Configatron is a new Ruby library that makes it easy to have persistently accessible configuration data available through your Ruby application. It bears some similarities to the Rails pluginSimpleConfig, but being distributed as a gem, is suitable for non-Rails applications. To install: gem install configatron

Once configatron is installed, the following code will get things going:

configatron do |config|
  config.app_name = "My Awesomely Jazzy App"
  config.database_url = "postgres://localhost/somedb"
  # etc...
end

It has not gone unnoticed that random announcements of individual events do not work well here on Ruby Inside. With events taking more of a local focus these days, it makes more sense to pool the announcements together. This post, therefore, is a rather uncelebrated launch of a new series of event-related compilation posts. Please make sure to post in comments if you have other events you want to mention or visit our Contact page.

MerbCamp - October 11 and 12, 2008 -…

After tackling the difficult task of improving Rails deployment, Phusion - the creators of Passenger (mod_rails) recently announced the availability of daemon_controller - a library (rather than a stand-alone tool) for managing daemons. It lets you write applications that manage daemons in a robust manner (e.g. mongrel_cluster or UltraSphinx could be adapted to use this library).

The primary motivation for using daemon_controller is to make it easier to have other applications (such as Rails apps) start daemons without encountering race conditions or parallel attempts.…

Videos from the recent Ruby Hoedown conference are now available at the Confreaks site.

The talks this year are split between traditional talks and "Lightning Talks" - 5 minute presentations that quickly highlight a single package or aspect of Ruby.  The talks cover a wide range of topics including Archaeopteryx - a Ruby MIDI/Music generator, easy phone calling with ruby, cloud computing, the usual testing and design patterns talks, and a slew of other quirky and useful presentations.

We first covered Mack in April, when I billed it as a "fast, best of the rest, Web app framework." Mack, a Ruby-based Web application framework, developed by a team led by Mark Bates, has continued to grow over the past several months and today announced a significant release, Mack 0.7.0.

Mack is a unique Ruby Web app framework due to its heavy focus on reusability across multiple applications. Mack supports distributed objects - yes, between multiple applications, distributed views and layouts, and even distributed…

Github is a great resource for finding new projects within the Ruby community. It has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post. Let us know if you like this as we might turn it into a regular series on Ruby Inside!

This month's picks:

NeverBlock is a Ruby (1.9) library developed by eSpace - an Egyptian Web 2.0 development team - that could make your life a whole lot easier if you have to deal with blocking IO operations that hold up all your Ruby threads.

NeverBlock makes it easy to get the benefits of non-blocking IO (IO operations that aren't held up by mutexes) in your Ruby apps without having to take the usual route of redesigning your app to be event-based. You get all…

WhatLanguage is a library by Peter Cooper (disclaimer: yes, that's me) that makes it quick and easy to determine what language a supplied text is written in. It's pretty accurate on anything from a short sentence up to several paragraphs in all of the languages supplied with the library (Dutch, English, Farsi, Russian, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Pinyin) and adding languages of your own choosing isn't difficult.

New Design

Till yesterday, Ruby Inside had been sporting the same tired design it had since launch in May 2006, but no more! Ruby Inside now has a more up to date design that focuses more on getting access to great Ruby (and some Rails) content from both Ruby Inside itself and other sites (like Ruby Flow).

If you only read Ruby Inside through the full text feed, please visit the site directly just to give it a look - pretty please? :)

While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.

A recent InfoQ article highlights some ways that Apple is using Ruby that you might have missed - including:

• The iPhone Configuration Web Utility - A tool written in Ruby on Rails for allowing enterprise customers to manage iPhones.
• The SproutCore JavaScript framework - Which is designed for making desktop-like applications…

Recently, Yahoo! launched BOSS - the "Build Your Own Search Service." In all but name, it appears very similar to their older Yahoo! Search API, as it allows you to query Yahoo's search index programatically. Under the surface though, Yahoo has removed the 5,000 query per day limit, you're unrestricted in how you present the data returned, you can re-order the data, and no attribution is required.

For Rubyists ready to play with BOSS, Jay Pignata has developed BOSSMan, a library for…