Ruby Inside

Back in December 2007, Antonio Cangiano presented The Great Ruby Shootout, a large set of benchmarks of then-current Ruby implementations (Ruby 1.8.5, YARV - early Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius, XRuby, and Cardinal). Even then, despite Ruby 1.9's infancy and experimental nature, Ruby 1.9 came out as about three times faster than Ruby 1.8.5 - while other implementations were barely faster than 1.8.5.

It was a few months ago that Rubysophic - a Bay Area startup working on products relating to Ruby diagnostics - came quietly into the Ruby scene, launching their first product, RubyRun Community Edition, a free, standalone application-performance diagnostic tool. While the most obvious use is with Rails applications, RubyRun works on any Ruby code (within reason) though it's primarily suited to Web applications.

I spoke with a few developers at Rubysophic recently to find out more about RubyRun and why they…

Everyone's favorite Australian Ruby developer, Dr. Nic Williams, has put together a handy slide presentation called How to Package Your Ruby Code where he demonstrates how he packages his various bits of Ruby code using RubyGems. His process is backed by his own NewGem, a library that generates a framework for a new Ruby gem, and Hoe by Ryan Davis.

In his explanatory blog post, Nic also ponders Perl's CPAN (a gigantic archive of Perl modules) and the module installation process it offers. When…

If you read Ruby Inside in 2006, you might remember our 2006 Ruby Advent Calendar. It featured the first look at the then-new AWS::S3 library, offered a Ruby code formatter for blog posts (which I still use here!), some Ruby wallpapers, and a lot more.

2007 had no Ruby advent calendar, unfortunately, but this year LakTEK, a Sri Lankan Ruby developer, has put together a good-looking 2008 Ruby Advent Calendar. Day one looked at rolling out a Sinatra and Sequel powered blog. Day…

It's time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going. Note: All descriptions and notes are written by Ruby Inside and are not directly influenced by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are those of Ruby Inside and not necessarily shared by the sponsor!

New Relic - Rails Performance Monitoring Systems

New Relic provides high-end performance monitoring solutions for Rails applications and they include 37signals and Shopify amongst their customers (very high praise indeed!)…

What's Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting interesting projects that are new or updated this month, within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github 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.

This month's picks:

• http://github.com/karmi/marley/ - Marley is minimal blog engine without…

At RubyConf 2008, other than giving his own Scaling Ruby talk, Gregg Pollack of EnvyCasts was hard at work getting summaries of all of the presentations from the speakers. In RubyConf 2008 in 90 Seconds you get a fast-fire summary of the summaries. In RubyConf in 31 Minutes you get a more complete record - good viewing for anyone who didn't attend the conference as it gives you a good idea of what's on the Ruby community's mind.

One of the coolest features of RubyConf…

If you've ever investigated how to build your own compiler, you might be familiar with LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine), a "compiler infrastructure" that makes it easy(ish) to create virtual machines, code generators, and optimizers of your own. It also has its own intermediate representation language that's architecture independent and the instruction sets and typing system available are similarly language independent. In theory, if you want to build your own programming language and a compiler for it, LLVM will get you most…

Ruby's most popular Web application framework, Ruby on Rails, takes another giant step today with the release of Rails 2.2! It follows on just five months after Rails 2.1, but offers even more significant improvements, particularly in the areas of compatibility, internationalization, and documentation. Read David Heinemeier Hansson's release post for a quick overview.

Ruby Inside's sister site, Rails Inside, was launched alongside Rails 2.1 in June, and would, you'd think, be the ideal place for a post like this, but no. Rails…

HappyMapper is John Nunemaker's attempt at "making XML fun again" for Rubyists by providing an object to XML mapping library with a succinct syntax. Essentially, you can use HappyMapper to rapidly turn XML into Ruby objects - even nesting them inside and referring to each other. This is powerful stuff. To install, just gem install happymapper

John's own examples are powerful demonstrations of how it works, so check them out. The first is parsing the XML returned from Twitter. The statues and associated…

Testing is a firmly ingrained part of the Ruby culture: you probably ran across Test::Unit not long after you first started writing Ruby code (though it wouldn't be surprising if you ignored it for a while). But it hasn't been a static part of Ruby - we've seen the simple availability of tests evolve into test-driven development (TDD) that in turn gave rise to behavior-driven development (BDD). Along the way, Ruby has spawned a variety of testing tools and frameworks. The latest,…

Earlier this month, Rails Envy's Gregg Pollack gave a talk at RubyConf08 called Scaling Ruby (without the Rails). He answered questions like "How do existing Ruby applications use Threads/Processes to scale?", "How do we implement an Event Driven application using Ruby EventMachine?", "What are the current bottlenecks with speeding up Ruby and how can they be fixed?", and "What does Ruby 1.9 bring to the table to speed things up?" From what I hear, it was a very well received…

Back in March, Ruby developer Gregory Brown raised the idea of receiving donations so he could work on open source Ruby projects full-time. It went well, and out of this project came Prawn, a pure Ruby PDF generation library. Not one to rest on his laurels, Gregory's now working on a book for O'Reilly called Ruby Best Practices, billed as "for programmers who want to use Ruby the way Rubyists do." The book will cover how to design "beautiful" APIs and…

When you want your objects to refer to / have associations with other objects, it can quickly become a complex procedure. Ryan Daigle to the rescue! Ryan has built Roxy, a "Ruby Proxy-Object Library." He's also put together an awesome blog post with the motivation for developing Roxy and some code examples showing how it works. Roxy gives you the ability to add some rather ActiveRecord-esque functionality to your classes and their instances.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Anyone building up a project with many dependencies - and in the Ruby community, with so much functionality wrapped up in gems and plugins, it's hard to imagine not having external dependencies! - must face the issue of managing the situation in source code control. How do you maintain everything you need in your own repository, while still being able to update your dependencies from their own repository? How do you set things up so you can even contribute to…