Free Software Linux

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

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.

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 the projects you depend on?

A brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) - Mobile Orchard. Mobile Orchard is a new iPhone developer news site, in a similar vein to Ruby Inside. We've already:

With only the performance of a scripting language, Ruby isn't considered a particularly suitable choice for intense video work (direct transcoding, encoding, and the like.). Nonetheless, there are a handful of Ruby libraries and Ruby-based technologies you can use to work with video and movie files - primarily through interacting with faster tools or libraries. RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library) RMov is an awesome new Ruby library by Ryan Bates that wraps around Apple's QuickTime API and allows you to open, edit, and export QuickTime movies from within Ruby. It is, unfortunately, OS X only.

Want to retrieve weather conditions in your Ruby script / application? There are four great solutions: WeatherMan, RWeather, rubyweather, and the Yahoo Weather Ruby API.

Giles Bowkett is anything but a quiet chap - indeed, he's one of the more outspoken members of our community. With the roar, however, comes a lot of wisdom, and Giles recent work on integrating Ruby and MIDI is inspired.

It was with much excitement that Merbcamp started yesterday with a keynote from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, initial creator of the Merb Web application framework. Aside from covering Merb-related news, Ezra revealed a project called Nanite - a "self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons."

A week ago, Adam Nelson (a Virginia-based Ruby developer) complained about Ruby's "absolutely bullshit Ruby HTTP client situation." He was running into a nasty situation where Ruby's standard HTTP client library (net/http) was sending data in 1 kilobyte chunks, causing his CPU to redline. Due to net/http's popularity (particularly with other libraries), Adam saw this as a big issue.

Ruby Manor is an interesting new event that will hopefully become a regular fixture on the Ruby events calendar! Taking place in London (at the University of London Union) on November 22, Ruby Manor is taking an "all hands on deck" approach to event organization, with intense discussion between attendees as to how it should be run. The initial organizers are Murray Steele and James Adam. Tickets cost £12 and, as of writing, 92 tickets are left. Any profits will go "behind the bar." If you're within London's catchment area (or just fancy a trip) signing up looks like a no-brainer.

Back in March 2008, Vidar Hokstad - a London based Norwegian developer - began to write a series of blog posts on writing a compiler in Ruby from the ground up. Early on, I took objection to some elements of his approach, but it still stands as a great series of posts. Vidar recently reached post 11, providing enough of a landmark to introduce the series as a whole (which is already scheduled to go up to at least 20 posts).

JS.Class is an attempt at making JavaScript more Ruby-like. More specifically, it's a library that makes object oriented development easier in JavaScript (in comparison to JS's prototype technique, at least) by implementing Ruby's core object, module, and class systems as well as some of Ruby's meta-programming techniques.

Garry Dolley has developed a Ruby module called "Immutable" (Github repository). It allows you to make your methods immutable. As Gary says, "provide it a list of methods you don’t want touched and it’ll make sure they can’t be redefined." Effectively, it's a smack-down against monkeypatching. Gary developed immutable to ensure that ActiveSupport wouldn't interfere with his attempts to improve Rails' loading time by reimplementing some ActiveSupport methods in C (by redefining his own changes).

Rubyology is a Ruby-based podcast chaired by Chris Matthieu. Its focus is on interviewing interesting Ruby (and Rails) developers - finding out about their projects, what makes them tick, and extracting their insights into the Ruby and Rails worlds. For some reason, Rubyology hasn't had a lot of love in the Ruby blogosphere, and after listening to several great interviews over the past few months, I've decided this is a great time to recommend you check it out if you're not already a subscriber. Recent highlights include:

Terminator is a new library developed by Ara Howard and Mikel Lindsaar that solves the problem of Ruby's own "timeout" feature not actually being up to the task of terminating code. timeout is supposed to terminate the execution of a block of code if it's not finished within a certain amount of time, but due to Ruby's threading model it doesn't always work that way!