Fast Markdown libraries for Ruby: two for the price of one.
So you've decided to start a weblog and have a really clever idea for titling it based on a snippet of code you find particularly novel. Rad!
What I'd like to do is run Firefox/Gecko on the server. It would load up the report, render it with the print stylesheet and then output the PDF. The concept is not unlike khtml2png or webkit2png but instead of outputting a raster image, it would output a PDF: gecko2pdf, if you will.
On Dreamhost freaking out because they can’t get Rails deployed reliably.
Cheap branches make for new uses.
It’s not Rails’s problem.
Charles Nutter on the possibility of a Rails support announcement in February 2007.
A prediction piece on the possibility of a Ruby backed coup d'état on the JVM and what that might mean to the pragmatic web developer.
Time Travel vs. ESP
Wherein we avoid a Python vs. Ruby flamewar by changing the subject to Object vs. RDMS persistence.
Just keep talking.
The web as currently imagined by the tech. industry is quite different from the web that actually exists.
What does Ruby on Rails have that we don’t and why?
Awesome idea. Nice syntax highlighting. (Via Simon Willison)
Not sure how I've never stumbled on this before. You can remove items from the list to cause require to reload a file.
“Jim Meyer, manager of LED says that Rails scales like any other web application: ‘That is to say you need to take into account all the components from the moment the request is received at the load balancer all the way down and all the way back again.’”
Agreed. I've been a lurker for going on a year now. Solid mailing list.
An initial version of RDiscount’s API docs just published on rubyforge…
Good idea. Solve the “concurrency problem” for dynamic/scripting languages and the “language syntax problem” for Erlang, without sacrificing the benefits of either. Someone needs to keep an eye on this.
There’s way more new stuff in here than I thought. 20%-30% of ActiveSupport’s core extensions, Enumerator support everywhere, Object#instance_exec, byte vs. char stuff, documentation, and more…
If you move the slides quickly, it feels a bit like playing Desktop Tower Defense.
“… the fact that [Twitter has] a nifty error page is a bonus really.”
cschneid has been helping me get the collection of hacks I've come to call a weblog into shape for some kind of release. He’s also been writing a lot of great Sinatra tips and tricks here. Check it out.
This is the template used to generate the HAML RDoc. It’s a massive improvement over the default template shipped with rdoc. I can almost stomach rdoc with this — almost.
Support for HTML4/HTML5 output, more control over whitespace, option for implicit HTML encoding, and now faster than ERB.
Ola Bini on def vs. define_method vs. eval for defining methods in Ruby. There really ought to be a simple way of getting stuff like this from blogs and into the standard Ruby doc.
“I still haven’t found anyone who knows how you implement Scaling in a language, so I guess that LRM will never have it… Anyone who care to enlighten me, please send me a detailed email with an implementation of Scaling.”
A gem for your project is automatically built each time the project_name.gemspec file is changed on your master branch.
I think I may finally be able to get rid of Colloquy.
Matt Chisholm evaluates Ruby against Python for an upcoming project and determines that it’s a big pile of doodoo. I can’t agree with the conclusion but he details a lot of Ruby’s warts really quite well.
This was a really great lesscode.org piece by Aristotle. The follow-up discussion in the comments was superb as well. Being in the middle of everything really warped my view of what was going on back then, I think.
David Heinemeier Hansson: “PHP scales down like no other package for the web and it deserves more credit for tackling that scope.”
Agreed!
Patch accepted!
Yukihiro (Matz) Matsumoto, David Flanagan, _why the lucky stiff, David A. Black, Charles Oliver Nutter, and Shyouhei Urabe: that’s what I call a writing team. Wow.
I repackaged mongrel_proctitle as a GemPlugin so that all mongrels on use it automatically. This is the first chance I've had to play with GitHub, too. Lovin' it.
Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: “mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4”. Let’s you monitor backends with ps and top.
Seriously interesting web based git browser and collaboration tool from the folks at Engine Yard. If anyone has a spare invite laying around, hook me up: rtomayko@gmail.com. I have a bunch of stuff sitting in bzr repos that I'd like to flip over to git.
A “Hello World” Rails webapp in fewer LOC than a Java console app that System.out.println(“Hello World”). The routes and controller DSLs look pretty interesting as well.
Nice Ruby assertion library that’s block based. Shows block contents when the assertion fails. Much cleaner than Test::Unit assertions and without the retarded RSpec non-sense. This really ought to be rolled into the stdlib Test::Unit, IMO.
“Cameltoe is a set of utility functions for making Ruby objects more like camel toes.” — You've piqued my interest :) It looks like this adds a String#cameltoeize method, amongst other things…
Evan Weaver: “These leaks tend to grow slowly. Your Rails app definitely has this kind of leak, especially if it uses the ActiveRecord session store.”
Peter Cooper scratches the deployment problem itch.
Dion Almaer sits down with Yegge to talk about his JavaScript/Rails port. Nice one-on-one video, candid, and thick in technical detail.
Ian takes a look at some of the attributes of PHP’s deployment model, why they work so well (for PHP), and why other environments have such a hard time duplicating them.
“The constraints, the instability, and the unpredictability of a shared hosting environment are a big part of the reason why the web hosting business is moving towards virtualization everywhere you look. Big kids need their own sandboxes to play in.”
Like khtml2png but using the gtkmozembed Ruby extension library (which I haven’t been able to build yet).
“Ousted ActionWebService from Rails 2.0 ” :)
something to dig into during a 1 hour conference call or whatever …
Checks pre-Rails 2.0 apps for compatibility.
Brings ActiveRecord’s transactions toward sanity and adds savepoints. The methods added to Object must go! — transaction, commit!, and rollback! will clash with existing libraries. e.g., PDF::Writer and Transaction::Simple.
“Every time some Rails fanboy starts peddling their hype, the approved thing to do is to respond with Erlang.” – Brilliant idea! That will bring some real substance to the argument.
“I'm getting more and more convinced that for the people that don’t need the things Java infrastructure can give you, Rubinius is the most important project around, in Ruby-land. More than that, Rubinius is MRI done right.”
“What matters a lot more than choice of programming language is the ability to get the project done, meaning tested and correct and launched. Apparently for Derek, PHP is the way to get that done, and Rails ain’t.” — it really is that simple. Period.
“But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-able with a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you’re really doing this.)”
“Maybe I’ll start to believe when they start promoting Ruby on Rails at JavaOne, as opposed to promoting JRuby on Rails at RailsConf.”
Comprehensive look at common Rails security concerns with links out to in-depth articles.
“I'm not really much into evangelizing Ruby and Rails much nowadays. You know, since we won, I have to admit that it became boring and besides the point.” :)
“‘Why are they doing all this?’, that’s a common concern with most Ruby folks … A Sun that’s heavily involved with Rails on the software side is a Sun that’s much better positioned to sell loads of hardware …”
Do not try to measure APIs vs site traffic… that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… There is no APIs.
“We're not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we're encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails,” he said. “Come if you like it, stay away if you don’t.”
Bill Burke is an idiot. Wow. And then, after being an idiot, he actually calls someone “gay” in the comments when they dare suggest that Ruby is a strongly typed language. Huh? I thought Red Hat had better taste.
Java becomes 100% more viable. So simple — why didn’t someone do this in the very beginning?
I must say, I'm a bit bummed that we're having this conversation at all.
Nice. This is going to save me some serious time.
“The general thrust of this argument is that having a full-fledge rich-windowing experience in the browser is going to put a stop to all that amateurish mucking around with JavaScript and the DOM. … that’s hogwash.”
“And yes, I've seen the Microsoft news … If Sun did something like this I'd resign.”
Rake ChangeLog
I no longer think applet support should be dropped from all major browsers. I've got links for anyone who produces a Jython version.
Pppkkkeeeewwwww.. The happy universe explodes. This is turning into one hell of a discussion.
The entire Twitter Scaling Problems conversation in one place.
jackpot.
Wow. Pretty solid anti dynamic language advocacy piece. It’s been a while since I've written anything longish so maybe I'll try to put together something of response to this.
I've been using this technique for some time with great success. Oh, and this site’s design is bordering on perfection.
subscribed
“This document explains how to make extension libraries for Ruby.”
“Well if Ruby developers are so damn productive, why can’t they write a faster ruby?”
These people are still around? Amazing. Ooohhh, “tens of thousands of simultaneous users” — scary! scary!
Matz’s ruby-postgres library has finally been forked.
“… the results for YARV/Rite are still streets ahead in terms of raw performance, and where I'm placing my bets for the next de facto Ruby interpreter.”
Wow.I shudder to even observe the brilliance that is _why. There’s an actual Cut-out Adventure Beard here.
Interesting concept. I'll have to check this out once it comes out of “pre-pre-pre alpha” (which doesn’t really make sense, btw. There’s nothing more alpha than alpha).
That’s sales growth not sales.
“All you have to do is change the internal processing, add 200 more methods to the HTTP parser, serve Bittorrent over Ethernet, and have it save Korean orphans while eating a Mango in the back seat of an El Camino driven by twenty midget clowns.”
“I would rather take an easily modifiable, open platform that I can make do what I need in a specific environment.”
We won on my birthday :)
Sam with a very simple, step by step tutorial on using your site as an OpenID identity provider.
This looks promising: handles all of Markdown proper plus various extensions.
Ranks programmers by who they consider themselves superior to. Comedy.
Danny Coward Q/A on invokedynamic and “hot swapping” (method replacement). Pretty good piece until the end where we enter into some scary Java-static-typing-is-good-because-it-let’s-you-publish-APIs non-sense.
Wherein the author lists 8 reasons (maybe 3 of which are approaching objective or even valid) and also spells Adrian’s name wrong: “Adrian Zolovaty”. Ruby/Python flame-bait is exactly what we need.
This guy gets around…
I take back everything bad I've ever said about Java Applets ;)
The best attempt I've seen at splicing multiple API references together. This uses the external documentation but provides indexing and browsing features.
the best shit ever
I'm starting to “get it” now… Makes a ton of sense.
why on rebinding blocks to specific objects.. I had to do the same thing a little while ago. Using instancemethod seemed like a hack but if it’s good enough for _why, it’s good enough for me.
I'm going to have to jump all over this.
Decent looking ruby library that implements a fair bit of an Atom Publishing Protocol client.
Perdy..
Holy crap this is the coolest language book I've ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters – there’s regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.
I'm going to see about moving my weblog to this..
That’s because they don’t have shithead analyst speculation driving feature development…
HARDYFUCKINGHARHAR! Laugh it up you dumb shits. This might have been funny were Ruby and PHP not eating your lunch.
Here they come…
The line forms to the left people..
Author of “Better, Faster, Lighter Java” compares building MVC webapps in Java to building them in Rails. I wish I could say I was surprised at the results but I'm not…
Sorry, I can’t stop linking to this guy…
Well written line-of-though writeup on the decision process leading up to a language selection when the sky is blue and you're building a new app. Hint: Python :)
A complete comparison..
An honest and objective comparison of Ruby and Python.
