Software Free

(Remix of an original CC 2.0 licensed work by Joichi Ito.)

From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) come a few new opportunities:

Note: This item has also been posted on Rails Inside. I don’t tend to make it a habit of crossposting items, but as Rails Inside is still very new, I am sure many Ruby Inside readers will want to know about it. Beware, however, you will need to subscribe to Rails Inside to get the skinny on new Rails events in the long term :)

It’s been years in the making, but it has finally arrived.. Rails Inside, the Rails-only equivalent of Ruby Inside! Featuring an all-new template, Rails Inside presents information in a similar format and style to Ruby Inside but with a focus entirely on the Ruby on Rails scene. If Rails is your main thing, or a significant part of your development life, get over there and subscribe (by RSS or e-mail - the e-mail version actually looks surprisingly nice I’ve found).

News moves so fast on the social media field, everyone needs a hand keeping up. Except for us of course, because we are like so on the ball. Yeah...ahem...right.

On that note here are the top social media stories from the past few days, distilled into a minute's worth of scanning.

Photo by JL2003 - CC 2.0 Attribution License

The official Ruby blog is reporting “multiple vulnerabilities” in the official Ruby interpreter (MRI). A significant number of versions are affected:

Ruby on Rails 2.1: What’s New? (PDF, 2MB) is a free e-book written by Carlos Brando (with help from Marcos Tapajos and Daniel Lopes). It was initially written in Brazilian Portuguese (find the original version here), but this version is an English translation by several community members.

RailsConf 2008 - the primary conference for Rails developers - took place over the last few days (May 29th to June 1st, 2008). By all accounts, everyone had a great time, but not everyone could attend so here’s a casual roundup of what happened.

The Pragmatic Programmers (who brought us the “Pickaxe“) have decided to branch into screencasting with Pragmatic Screencasts. At launch, screencasts for Expression Engine, OS X Core Animation, Erlang, and Rails are available. On the Rails front, Ryan Bates (of Railscasts fame) has been brought on board to create a series called “Everyday Active Record.” So far two episodes, each focusing on a different area of Rails / Active Record, are available (at $5 each) but more are promised over time.

Prolific Rails developer Bruno Bornsztein (interviewed on Ruby Inside in February 2007) does it again! Not content to settle for releasing 14-plus Rails related projects and Web sites, he has developed Community Engine, an “instant open-source social network plugin” for Rails. Unlike Insoshi and Lovd By Less, which are full social networking Rails applications, Community Engine is a plugin that can add social networking features to existing Rails applications.

Passenger (often known as “mod_rails“) is an Apache module developed by Phusion, a small Dutch IT consultancy, that makes it easy to deploy Rails applications on Apache-based stacks. Passenger follows on well from the popular “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability on the Web” discussion of January 2008 in that it mostly solves the Rails deployment issue (see SwitchPipe for an alternative that can deal with non-Rails frameworks).

Evan Phoenix has announced that the Rubinius project has hit a major milestone: Rubinius can run Rails! This makes it implementation #3 (after MRI and JRuby) to join the Rails club and will help cement its reputation as a strong, key implementation to watch in the future. Chad Fowler goes as far as to assert that in a year’s time, Rubinius will be used in production deployments and quickly become the defacto standard Ruby implementation shortly thereafter.

Eyes are now on Microsoft’s implementation, IronRuby, that may also be joining the Rails club soon.

I usually try to get a review copy and read through a book before mentioning it here, but a book like Deploying Rails Applications (Amazon.com alternative) has been in demand for a long time now. Its provenance (coming from the keyboards of Ezra “Engine Yard” Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin - and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) encourages me to support it without direct review. That’s not to say it’s certainly a good book, but it darn well shouldn’t be a bad one.

Hours ago, David Heinemeier Hansson announced informally on Twitter:

Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged, the gems are on the beta server, official announcement shortly. But no need holding you back from trying it.

New features include built-in timezone support, Gem dependencies, better caching, and more.

To get Rails 2.1 RC1 from the beta gems server, just use:

sudo gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/

If you prefer to go native, Ryan Bates of Railscasts has already produced a screencast showing how to install Rails 2.1 RC1 using Git.

RubyFlow - the community based companion site to Ruby Inside - has been on fire! I’m finding out about lots of new stuff on there that then gets included into Ruby Inside posts. It’s the place to be if you want the most up to date Ruby and Rails news, but don’t mind putting up with a bit of ‘noise’.

Every two weeks or so I’m going to summarize some of the best items from RubyFlow here on Ruby Inside, so that you can still keep up with the latest developments even if you don’t want to be soaked in the firehose of Ruby news over there.

For the period April 24 to May 5, 2008:

Net::SSH 2.0 Released: Jamis Buck announces the release of Net::SSH 2.0 and the availability of Net::SFTP 2.0, Net::SCP 1.0, Net::SSH::Gateway 1.0 and Net::SSH::Multi 1.0.

New Relic is a new entrant into the nascent Ruby on Rails® application monitoring market, so far dominated by FiveRuns. The company has just taken $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from heavyweights Benchmark Capital. Rather impressively, New Relic has already been featured on TechCrunch, where writer Mark McGranaghan notes that New Relic’s founder, Lewis Cirne, previously ran a similar company in the Java space.