The Ruby Roundup

Generic Lookups in Rails

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:50:00 GMT

Tonight I plan on presenting at the Atlanta Ruby Users Group on handling generic lookups in Rails.

Patience Grasshopper

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 18:08:00 GMT

James and I were unable to get a podcast together over Easter weekend; but we should definitely have one out within a week. The Ruby news has been a bit slow lately, so the two-week lag should give us an opportunity for more interesting content.

Episode 3 - Newscast for April 1

Wed, 4 Apr 2007 12:26:00 GMT

Big News Items

Ruby 1.8.6 released
Ruby one-click installer for Windows now supports Ruby 1.8.6
Rails 1.2.3 has been released -- now compatible with Ruby 1.8.6
Instant Rails 1.7 Released
Joyent announces Slingshot -- provides offline capabilities for Rails applications
More details about Slingshot from its creators

Gem of the Week - Tattle

Tattle: The Ruby Census
Take a look at the latest tattle statistics

Tip(s) of the Week

Clean up your Rails controllers with Verify

Use verify in your controller to filter access based on the HTTP method. For example, I put following line in a controller to ensure that the signup action will only accept an HTTP POST; and, if called via anything else, the user is redirected to the index:

verify :method => :post, :only => :signup, :redirect_to => :index

Some TextMate Shortcuts

Use Command-T to quickly jump to another file. This command will bring up a dialog box from where you can find the file by simply typing the first few letters of the file name

Use Command-Shift-T to jump to the known symbols in a file. When editing a Ruby file, this will allow you to jump to any of the methods defined. In an rhtml (or html) file, it will let you jump to an element based on id.

Rapid Fire Quick News Items

Ruby/DB2 driver/adapter release 0.4.0
Creating DSLs with Ruby
Haml 1.5 Released
7 Cool New Ruby Snippets
Ruby Hoedown 2007: August 10-11 in Raleigh, NC (the call for participation is now open)
Trawlr: Rails-based Newsreader
What's New in Edge Rails: Object Transactions Are Out
Rails Envy: Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial - Part 2
Railscasts - Free Ruby on Rails Screencasts
Hobo - the web application builder for Rails
Typo 4.1 Released
Ryan's Scraps: REST & ActiveResource
Rubyinline walk through by Evan Weaver
Rails For All, a Rails advocacy group, has been officially launched
CruiseControl.rb now available from ThoughtWorks
CruiseControl.rb Growl Notifier Plugin
Creating Extensions in Rails by Bruce Tate
New PDF Book "Payment Processing with Paypal and Ruby" now available
ActiveMerchant: a Ruby library for payment processing
ActiveScaffold version 1 RC1 Released
The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient
Getting to Know the Ruby Core Classes: Enumerable#grep
JRuby Regular Expressions
Charles Nutter proposes Ruby on Grails
Graeme Rocher's response to Charles

Episode 2 - Newscast for March 13

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:33:00 GMT

Big News Items

Advanced Ruby Studio
JRuby 0.9.8 Released
Aptana takes over RadRails

Gem of the Week - attachment_fu

attachment_fu
Mike Clark's Attachment_Fu Tutorial

Tip of the Week

Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know

Rapid Fire Quick News Items

BCrypt 2.0.1 Released
Variable Bindings in Ruby
Easy Project has released version 0.6.0
Piston has released version 1.3.1
Mike Clark on Piston
ActiveWarehouse ETL version 0.6.0 released
XRuby performance
Rubyforge version 0.4.1 has been released!
Image Science version 1.1.1 has been released!
Revolution On Rails: Gem-based Deployment and Delivery: Part 1
the { buckblogs :here }: Raising the right exception
Globalize now ready for Rails 1.2!
WX Ruby Debug version 0.11 Ruby Reports (ruport) releases version 0.8.11
ActiveRecord-JDBC version 0.2.3 released
PeepCode Page Caching and httperf Screencast>
BenCurtis.com: Rails, OpenID, and Acts as Authenticated
Roman Strobl's NetBeans on Rails Screencasts
Wonderfully Flawed Podcasts

Episode 1 - Newscast for March 7

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 16:02:00 GMT

Big News

RailsConf Sold Out
Gotham Ruby Conference
Try Ruby in your browser
Learn Ruby on Rails: Ultimate Beginner Tutorial
Rails for Java Developers
Open ID Plugin
The "Nameless One" IDE Comparison
Ruby Implementation Shootout

Gem of the Week - Acts As Ferret

Acts_As_Ferret
Acts As Ferret Tutorial
Lucenc Query Parser Syntax

Tip of the Week

Testing Helpers with HelperTestCase and assert_select

You can use assert_select quite easily with HelperTestCase. Simply do the following:

Add @response = ActionController::TestResponse.new into the HelperTestCase#setup
In your test case, store the result of the helper method in @response.body

The following example demonstrates:

class ApplicationHelperTest < HelperTestCase include ApplicationHelper def test_checkmark_img @response.body = checkmark_img(true) assert_select "img" end end

When using the content_tag method to generate html, you must also include the CaptureHelper and TextHelper modules into HelperTestCase. Due to a known bug, you cannot pass a block to content_tag from a test case.

Quick News Items

RSpec 0.8.0 released
RCov 0.8.0 released
Rake 0.7.2 released
Instant Rails 1.5 Final has been released
A new major version of Facets - release 1.8 has been released.
InfoQ: Introduction to ActiveMessaging for Rails
Mike Clark's Attachment_Fu Tutorial
MacDevCenter.com -- Replacing AppleScript with Ruby
Ryan's Scraps - What's New in Edge Rails
Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails on Windows Vista
Bringing Ruby and Rails to the JVM - Parleys - The Belgian Java User Group
ServerSide : 10 steps to get Ruby on Rails running on Windows with IIS FastCGI
The Magic Pens of Ruby

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