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New Relic RPM Officially Supports Rack and Sinatra – Finally!

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 6:50pm MST by Peter Cooper

New Relic's RPM, an application performance monitoring and reporting system, has today announced it has added full support for Sinatra and Rack-based Ruby applications to its traditionally Rails-centric service. It's been possible to hack in support for non-Rails apps into New Relic before, but this move brings them officially into the fold with all of the features only Rails apps used to be able to take advantage of.

New Relic's press release on the news includes a typically "press release sounding" quote from Ryan Tomayko, but as a key contributor to Sinatra and Rails, and as a GitHub employee, it seems worth quoting:

Rack has given Ruby web developers a tremendous amount of freedom to innovate and experiment with new ways of building web applications.

Developers are increasingly turning to Rack and lightweight frameworks like Sinatra for small utility apps or for latching performance critical features onto an existing site. The ability to monitor and profile these applications using New Relic RPM fills a huge visibility gap for us.

So there you go. New Relic have also updated the "agent" that's used to communicate between your apps and their servers and added some Ruby specific features including enhanced visibility in garbage collection, developer mode profiling, "enhanced" JRuby support, and Phusion Passenger queue time capturing (this sounds particularly useful for tweaking your stack).

As always, New Relic RPM is free to use at a "Lite" level and if you're a new user, they'll give you a week of "Gold" level features for free to sweeten the deal. You can keep running at Lite after that though if you don't want to pay. The "Bronze" plan starts at $50 per month (on an annual basis) per host but they also have an "on demand" Amazon EC2 style pricing structure starting from 10 cents per hour.

We've been keeping an eye on New Relic since early 2008 and they seem to have gone from strength to strength over the years. Early on, FiveRuns' RM-Manage was still a better option than RPM (in my opinion) but with FiveRuns going the way of the dodo recently, New Relic have become the main game in town when it comes to Ruby webapp performance monitoring (though Scout are giving them a run for their money in certain areas).
Building A Well Formed Number Handling Class From Scratch

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 6:21pm MST by Peter Cooper

Over on the Ruby Best Practices blog, Robert Klemme walks through the process of building a new numeric class from scratch in Ruby - taking into account all the gotchas and considerations that pop up along the way. Robert's task is harder and more involved than you'd initially suspect.!

Robert chooses to build a HexNum class that can represent integers that are then displayed as hex numbers. There are considerations to be made with handling conversions from existing numeric types and his new HexNum class, conversions to other types, supporting standard comparison methods, and overloading.

All of the above concerns are covered in the post with all the quality and detail you should expect from the RBP blog by now. This post in particular should prove interesting to most Ruby developers who feel happy digging deep (no, this isn't an article for beginners!).

[job] BeenVerified.com is currently looking for a Ruby and Rails developer to join their team in New York City. Alternatively, check out one of the other 12 jobs on our Ruby jobs board!
How Ruby Manages Memory and Garbage Collection

Posted: February 23rd, 2010, 5:33pm MST by Peter Cooper

Garbage Collection and the Ruby Heap is a presentation given by Joe Damato and Aman Gupta at the recent LA Ruby Conference. You only get the slides for now (all 70 of them!), but they're very detailed and can almost work as a standalone concise e-book on Ruby's garbage collection system.

Joe and Aman take a look at C memory management vs Ruby and show the difference between the stack and the heap. As a garbage collected language, Ruby takes the easy route by putting everything on the heap and the presentation demonstrates how the MRI (Matz's Ruby 1.8) does this, as well as how objects are tracked within memory (right down to the underlying C structs).

MRI's garbage collection scheme isn't particularly well optimized (though Phusion's Ruby Enterprise Edition has made some tweaks) and the presentation demonstrates the viability of some other garbage collection schemes (as always, the issue is compatibility with native extensions).

The presentation finishes off with a interesting walkthrough of using memprof (a Ruby memory profiler) to debug a memory leak in Rails 3.

[e-book] The Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook by Jeremy McAnally is a 120 page guide on migrating your apps from Rails 2.x to Rails 3.0. There's a review of it on Rails Inside if you want to learn more.
5 Chapters of O’Reilly’s Ruby Best Practices – Free!

Posted: February 23rd, 2010, 4:03pm MST by Peter Cooper
Ruby Best Practices is a book by Gregory Brown (and published by O'Reilly) that looks into the "Ruby way" of doing things in the Ruby language and, specifically, why Rubyists tend to write Ruby the way they do. It's an engaging book and we took a look at it and interviewed Gregory Brown about it just over a year ago.

Gregory always wanted to be able to give away his book with a Creative Commons license eventually and O'Reilly have kindly allowed him to start doing that, a chapter at a time. So far, the first five chapters are available to download at GitHub (in PDF format). Specifically:
- Chapter 1 - Driving Code Through Tests
- Chapter 2 - Designing Beautiful APIs
- Chapter 3 - Mastering the Dynamic Toolkit
- Chapter 4 - Text Processing and File Management
- Chapter 5 - Functional Programming Techniques
However, it's not just a free for all! If you read these chapters, Gregory (the primary author of the book) implores you to comment and offer any advice or insights you might have on the relevant posts on the RBP blog.. he also suggests that if you really like it, you should buy a copy of the book somehow, if only to convince O'Reilly that this publishing model is a "Good Thing." Gregory claims that the book hasn't even made its advance back yet (how!?), which makes this gesture all the better.

To buy a copy, head over to O'Reilly for e-book and print copies or go to your usual bookselling site (Amazon.com are probably the cheapest as usual).

Kudos to Gregory and O'Reilly for this move.
Harmony: JavaScript And A DOM Environment In Ruby

Posted: February 16th, 2010, 6:37pm MST by Peter Cooper

Harmony, from Martin Aumont, is a new Ruby DSL for executing JavaScript and DOM-using code from within Ruby apps. Why's that cool? Well, it enables you to build your own Ruby-level unit tests for JavaScript code within your Web applications - everything can be under one set of test suites!

Harmony sounds like a significant piece of engineering, but really it's a wrapper that stands on the shoulder of giants in the form of Johnson, which provides the Mozilla Spidermonkey Javascript runtime to Ruby, and env.js, a DOM environment recreated in JavaScript.

Harmony's "Hello World" example:

HolyGrail: The Rails Plugin
If you're using Rails, HolyGrail is a plugin that brings the power of Harmony to your apps (so far in functional tests only). Some example tests with HolyGrail:

Note: This Harmony is not to be confused with the awesome Harmony CMS that esteemed Rubyist John Nunemaker is working on..
Ruby Quicktips: A Tumblelog of Quick Ruby Tips

Posted: February 12th, 2010, 4:31pm MST by Peter Cooper
Ruby Quicktips is a Tumblr-powered tumblelog (think of a blog but in bite-sized chunks) by Daniel Pietzsch that presents a growing array of Ruby related tips and interesting code snippets. Daniel seems keen for you to contribute, and you can do so on its submissions page. There's an "about us" post if you want to learn more in general.

Daniel has done a good job of curating the 20 or so tips that he's put up over the last couple of months, and I bet with your help, it could become a significant resource. Picking up a few tips each week is a great way to keep your mind fresh and the ideas flowing! The tips posted so far are mostly quite basic, but with more submissions, a wider gamut of skill levels could be covered.

A selection of the tips posted so far:
Ruby Quicktips also has a Twitter account you can follow to be notified when the latest tip has been published. There's also an RSS feed if you prefer that.
11 New Ruby Delights (For If/When You’re Tired of Rails 3.0)

Posted: February 11th, 2010, 3:40pm MST by Peter Cooper

Sick of Rails 3.0 yet or still enjoying your Sinatra, Rango, Ramaze, Cramp, or totally non-Web-based development? OK - I've sniffed out 12 new, interesting Ruby related libraries or blog posts just for you! with no Rails whatsoever!
Buzzr: Google Buzz Library For Ruby
A few days ago, Google unveiled Buzz - its latest attempt to compete with Twitter and Facebook. Buzzr is a Ruby library by Conor Hunt that helps you interact with the Atom feeds that Buzz puts out.
VirtualBox Gem
VirtualBox is a popular, free and open source virtualization system that allows you to run multiple operating systems under your existing one (think VMware Workstation) and VirtualBox (same name) is also a Ruby library that you can use to control the eponymous program. From Ruby you can launch instances, query them, and deal with hard drive images.
JRuby-Complete
JRuby Complete takes the "vendor everything" idea to extremes by providing an entire Ruby implementation in a Java-land JAR archive that you can use even in Java environments where a Ruby isn't already installed. This could be handy for those of you trying to sneak Ruby into the enterprise!
37 Reasons To Love Ruby
Hal Fulton, of The Ruby Way fame, has written a list of 37 reasons he loves Ruby. It did pretty well on the social bookmarking sites last week and.. it's a good list. Mostly obvious stuff if you're a Rubyist, but it could be useful if you want to swing some opinions somewhere. Related to this is Why You Should Be Grateful For Coding in Ruby by Ruby Inside alumnus Hendy Irawan.
Defining Methods, JavaScript-Style
Sasa Brankovic has come up with a clever little hack to allow you to define methods "JavaScript style" in Ruby. Essentially, you can define a method with a line like obj.method = proc { puts "hello" } and call it with just obj.method. I can't see this catching on, but it's a nice idea.
SafariRSS - A Safari RSS Handler for OS X
Isaac Kearse has twisted some MacRuby and HotCocoa into SafariRSS, a handler for RSS feeds that Safari will recognize (meaning that when you click the "RSS" button in Safari, it'll launch your app and do whatever you like with them).
D'Note - Developer Notes from Ruby Code
D'Note is a tool that scans your source code for specially made "notes" and turns them into a document in either plain text, RDoc, Markdown, SOAP, XOXO, XML, HTML, YAML, or JSON format (or you can even specify a custom ERB template). This could be handy for keeping track of your TODOs, FIXMEs, and similar.
Gem In A Box - Simple Internal Gem Hosting
Seemingly taking a little influence from Gemcutter, Gem In A Box is a new tool for hosting your own RubyGems internally/in-house. It's easy to install and the presentation is nice.
Shoulda Textmate Bundle
If you're using the OS X editor TextMate and the Shoulda Ruby testing library, Shalva Usubov has put together a handy Shoulda TextMate bundle to make your life a bit easier.
Net::DAV - WebDAV a la Net::HTTP
Net::DAV describes itself as "a WebDAV client library in the style of Net::HTTP." If you're a WebDAV user, you'll know how useful that could be. Essentially, WebDAV is a set of extensions to regular HTTP that allow you to remotely lock and edit files on HTTP servers (among other things). Net::DAV is a few months old, but is being updated regularly.
Using Gemcutter's API from the Command Line
Gabriel Horner gives us a walkthrough of using GemCutter's API from the command line, specifically relying upon his Boson command/task framework.
Want More Ruby Stuff?
Don't forget to check out our community-driven sister site, RubyFlow. There are lots of cool new Ruby projects and links posted every day!

[job] Snapizzi is currently looking for a Ruby and Rails developer to join their team in Santa Barbara, CA. Alternatively, check out one of the other 11 jobs on our Ruby jobs board!
Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources To Get You Going

Posted: February 5th, 2010, 4:27pm MST by Peter Cooper

Enclosure: [download]

Whenever something's a really "big deal" in the Ruby world, we cover it - even if it makes more sense on Rails Inside (which is now switching to a user contributions model). Given that, we've gone through all the latest and greatest Rails 3.0 related links and put together a ton of them to help you on your way with the recently released Rails 3.0 beta. Enjoy!
Getting Started / Must Reads
Rails 3.0 Release Notes - An epic amount of documentation from the Rails Guides project. If you're already pretty familiar with Rails 2.x and just want to know what's new and updated, this is the place to look first. If you read this whole page, you'll get a good feel for what you need to pick up next.

The Path to Rails 3: Greenfielding New Apps With The Rails 3 Beta - Jeremy McAnally has written an awesome practical guide to setting up Rails 3 beta and creating a new app from scratch. Of note is his coverage of the new app generator and configuration system. He gets you as far as finishing off some scaffolding and even adding some tests.

Rails 3 Introduction - A two week old post by Jeremy McAnally that provides a high level introduction to Rails 3. What is it, why is it? And so forth. He demonstrates how Rails has moved from a monolithic, packaged "deal" to an ecosystem of more loosely coupled libraries that work together.

How To Install Rails 3.0 Beta - Our own guide to getting Rails 3.0 up and running. Sure, it's only two lines, but we beat the official Rails blog by 4 minutes on this *g*

RailsPlugins.org - A new Rails plugins directory.
Upgrading & Preparing Your Existing Apps
Geoffrey Grosenbach's Rails 3 Upgrade Screencast - Geoffrey Grosenbach (of PeepCode fame) has put together a free screencast demonstrating how to migrate a Rails 2.x app to Rails 3.0. A very high quality production.

rails_upgrade Plugin - An official plugin that runs checks on your Rails 2.x application and notifies you of obvious things that need to be changed for Rails 3.0 usage. It's unlikely to give you full coverage of every issue, but as a general overview it's pretty cool.

5 Things You Can Do Today to Make Your App Ready for Rails 3 - A short post that recommends you start to use Bundler, use inherited_resources, use rails_xss, use more named scopes, and change your references to certain constants.. all in your existing app so it's easier to upgrade to 3.0 later.

Rails 3 Ready Plugins - If you're heavily dependant on a certain plugin, see if it's already on the confirmed Yes/No list of plugins that do/don't work with Rails 3.0. It's still a short list so if you're a plugin maintainer, be sure to add your plugin if you know either way!

How to upgrade plugins to Rails 3.0 - A fresh and code heavy look at how to make some basic changes to upgrade a Rails 2.x plugin to Rails 3.x standards!
Rails 3.0 Libraries and Components
Active Record Query Interface 3.0 - Pratik Naik demonstrates ActiveRecord's finder methods and shows how a number of techniques are being deprecated in Rails 3.1. In essence, queries move away from a single find* method packed with arguments to a chain of methods performed upon a simpler find. There are lots of good code examples in here! Why Arel? is also a great introduction to this topic and shows the motivation and theory behind the "relational algebra" in ActiveRecord 3.

ActiveModel: Make Any Ruby Object Feel Like ActiveRecord - Yehuda Katz introduces us to the new ActiveModel system in Rails 3.0 by showing us how we can use it to make any Ruby class feel like an old-school ActiveRecord model. All of this is a result of splitting out the model and database behavior from ActiveRecord into separate libraries, thus removing the necessity for a database backend (or nasty hacks).

Render Options in Rails 3 - Yehuda Katz looks at how Rails 3's rendering pipeline works and demonstrates how to add a custom PDF renderer to it.

Generic Actions in Rails 3 - Yehuda Katz (again!) shows us how to create clever "generic actions" to do things like redirections direct from the routes file and generic template rendering. It's also worth a look for the discussion on route matcher changes.

Making Generators for Rails 3 With Thor - David Trasbo demonstrates how to use Thor (essentially a better Rake - sorta) to produce new generators for Rails 3 projects. This is a code heavy walkthrough. There's more on generators here.

New ActionMailer API in Rails 3.0 - Mikel Lindsaar got stuck in and built a much improved mail library for Ruby. This new "mail" library is now the new foundation of ActionMailer in Rails 3.0. In this article, Mikel gives a tour of how it works and how you can put together mails quickly and easily from within Rails 3.0 apps.

Validations in Rails 3.0 - Mikel Lindsaar shows how validations have changed in Rails 3.0. Instead of being a part of ActiveRecord, they're now in ActiveModel and can be used on non-DB related objects too! The old school validation methods are still around but now there are some other, cleaner ways to accomplish the same things.. Mikel shows you how.

Rails3_DataMapper - A library that gets DataMapper working on Rails 3. It was updated just yesterday and people have been recommending it on Twitter. If you're a DataMapper user, check it out! Update: There's now a tutorial on getting DataMapper running on Rails 3 beta!

The Rails Module - Nick Quaranto looks at how constants like RAILS_ROOT, RAILS_ENV and RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER have been deprecated in favor of accessing methods stored in the global Rails module (e.g.: Rails.root, Rails.env, Rails.logger).

Rails 3 I18N Changes - José Valim looks at some internationalization (i18n) changes in Rails 3.0 over 2.x - along with basic examples.
Insights
A Retrospective - Rails 3 core team member Yehuda Katz looks back at the past year and analyzes the key changes. This is worth reading if you want a softer, more thoughtful, higher level view than the release notes provide.

My 5 Favorite Things About Rails 3 - It's a few months old, but Yehuda Katz takes a look at some of the sticking points of Rails 2.x and shows how Rails 3 provides significant improvements.
Misc
Webbynode Gets Rails 3 Support for Rapid Deployment - Hosting company Webbynode shows how you can deploy a Rails 3.0 app to their VPS system with just a single command line entry. It's a bit like Heroku but more powerful and customizable. Of course, you have to pay for the VPS, but hey :-) It's also demonstrated how you can run a Rails and PHP app side by side on the same system.

How to Install Rails 3.0 Beta on Ubuntu Linux - An Ubuntu-specific guide to setting up a basic Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.0 beta stack.

Let Your SQL Growl in Rails 3.0 - Gavin Stark demonstrates how he tweaked Rails 3.0 to put out Growl notifications for all SQL queries performed by ActiveRecord. Cute trick.

Exploring Rails 3 Free Online Conference - O'Reilly and RailsConf are putting on a free two hour online conference that features Yehuda Katz, Gregg Pollack, Jeremy Kemper and Ryan Tomayko talking about different parts of the Rails 3.0 ecosystem. It takes place on February 18, 2010.

Signed and Permanent Cookies in Rails 3 - Pratik Naik demonstrates how to set "permanent" cookies in Rails 3.0, more easily than in previous versions, all thanks to a new cookies.permanent object.

Extending Rails 3 Video - Yehuda Katz in an hour long talk demonstrating how to extend Rails 3.0.

New Rails Logos - Wanna use a Rails logo somewhere without obvious licensing or trademark issues? Check out our little contest/brewing pot of public domain logos over at Rails Inside!

How to Build Sinatra on Rails 3 - Yehuda Katz gives a code heavy demonstration of how to get a basic Sinatra application working within a Rails 3 app.

Unobtrusive JavaScript in Rails 3 - A very old post looking at some of the changes being made to JavaScript helpers in Rails 3.0.

Changes in Rails 3.0 for Agile Web Development with Rails Edition 3 - The Pragmatic Programmers are keeping a page with changes necessary for the popular AWDWR book to keep it working with Rails 3. Good to look at it if you're learning from this book!

Rails 3 App Generator Script - Want to get a complete, scaffolded Rails 3 app up in seconds? This script will get you on your way.

MooTools Driver for Rails 3 Helpers - Rails 3 is now JavaScript framework agnostic, and if you want to use MooTools, here's some info on how to go about it.

North Korean Rails 3.0 Launch Party - Everyone's in on the festivities!

NEW! Bundle Me Some Rails - A walk through using the new Gem bundler with Rails 3.0 by Mikel Lindsaar.

Another Rails 3 Link List - Michael Bumann started to keep a list of Rails 3.0 links a few days ago, so there might be others not covered here. Just found another one by Melvin Ram too.

Logo at top of post courtesy of Dylan Clendenin. See more new, unofficial Rails logos and/or submit your own!

[news] @peterc here! My next "big thing" is a new site called coder.io. If you're into technologies like Ruby, Git, Python, the iPhone, MySQL, JavaScript, Clojure, etc, you might want to get on the coming soon list for some eventual freebies/bonuses along with exclusive early access. Thanks!
Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku

Posted: February 5th, 2010, 1:22pm MST by Peter Cooper
Toto ^{(GitHub repo)} is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata. At only 300 lines, it's easy to hack to your own taste, too.

Alexis has decided to push Toto by demonstrating how easy it is to deploy - for free - on the Heroku platform. You can literally get a blog up on Heroku within 5 minutes, even if you haven't already got a Heroku account (I just tried it).
How To Do It
Here are the basic steps:
- Sign up for an account at Heroku.com - all you have to do is provide an e-mail address, validate it, then enter a password.
- gem install heroku
- git clone git://github.com/cloudhead/dorothy.git your-blog-dir
- cd your-blog-dir
- heroku create
- Use the URL returned by heroku create and add a line in to the Toto::Server.new block in config.ru like: set :url, 'http://your.heroku.url.here'
- git commit -am "Added URL"
- git push heroku master
- You're live!
It's that simple - I just tried it (see [furious-fire-87.heroku.com] for a live demo)! Beyond this stage, you need to check out Toto's documentation and actually add some posts to your Toto install, customize the template, and what not.

If you're interested in lightweight systems like Toto, check out Scanty and Jekyll (which includes a blog-like system but at heart is designed to cope with full sites).
Rails 3.0 Beta/Prerelease Available Now and How To Install It

Posted: February 4th, 2010, 8:29pm MST by Peter Cooper
Today, Rails core member Jeremy Kemper dropped the words that lots of ardent Rails developers have been waiting for: "Rails 3 beta is LIVE." It's true! Rails 3.0's first approved beta/pre-release version is now live and ready for you to install.

Unfortunately, the installation process isn't as easy as Jeremy explains. RubyGems doesn't support the installation of prerequisites on pre-release gems, so you need to install them all manually. I think I have some instructions to cover that (works on 1.8.7 and 1.9.1):
```
gem install i18n tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler
# remember to prefix with "sudo" if your environment needs that
```
And then, finally:
```
gem install rails --pre
```
Worth reading next is a retrospective and summary of the work done for Rails 3.0 so far by Yehuda Katz.

[news] @peterc here! My next "big thing" is a new site called coder.io. If you're into technologies like Ruby, Git, Python, the iPhone, MySQL, JavaScript, Clojure, etc, you might want to get on the coming soon list for some eventual freebies/bonuses along with exclusive early access. Thanks!
MacRuby 0.5 Released: A Significant, Stable Release

Posted: February 1st, 2010, 5:23pm MST by Peter Cooper
MacRuby has hit a significant milestone in its development today: version 0.5! The key features include improved HotCocoa support (though this is now maintained separately from core on GitHub), better Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and support for OS X 10.6's Grand Central Dispatch.
Give It A Go!
If you've got a Mac and haven't yet tried out MacRuby, give it a go - its speed and general level of support for Ruby is very impressive. You can download MacRuby as a standalone package with installer (for OS X 10.6 and higher) or if you're using RVM, do an update and then rvm install macruby to get the latest nightly build. Matt Aimonetti, of the MacRuby project, reassures us that "MacRuby is namespaced and won’t affect your current Ruby installations" - but RVM is still an option, nonetheless.

Once you give MacRuby a try, check out HotCocoa too (installed with macgem install hotcocoa). It's a library that acts as a "Ruby layer" between Cocoa and MacRuby. Instead of wrestling with Cocoa's classes and verbose method names, HotCocoa wraps up Cocoa in a big, warm blanket of familiar Ruby. Take this very simple "throw a window with a button on the screen" app, for example:
```
require 'rubygems'
require 'hotcocoa'

include HotCocoa

application do |app|
  win = window :size => [100,50]
  b = button :title => 'Hello'
  b.on_action { puts 'World!' }
  win << b
end
```
Will the iPad support MacRuby?
Matt says "No." The problem isn't a lack of desire or interest, but that the iPhone OS (also used on the iPad) doesn't do automatic garbage collection or have BridgeSupport support - both of which are needed for MacRuby. Supposedly, though, contributors are looking into ways to circumvent these issues, but I'm more hopeful of GC support in iPhone OS 4.0..

[ruby inside news] Peter here! My next "big thing" is a new site called coder.io. If you're into technologies like Ruby, Git, Python, the iPhone, MySQL, JavaScript, Clojure, etc, you might want to get on the coming sooon list :-) There should hopefully be some freebies/bonuses along with exclusive early access. Thanks!