Recently in Ruby and RoR Category
Last Thursday, I had a lot of fun talking about JRuby on Rails at the Düsseldorf Java User Group -- I had a great audience with smart questions and a topic I'm really excited about. As usual, I've put the slides online.
Great post from Ola Bini about the "lack of scalability" of Ruby. It's interesting to see how many commenters totally miss the point, either feeling they need to explain scalability to him, our mixing up a framework (Rails) with a language (Ruby).
I had often thought about implementing a Lisp interpreter, but back in the “old days”, the thought of implementing garbage collection and the whole runtime thing was a bit daunting. This was in the day before C, so my implementation language would have been assembler … yech.
But as I was reviewing the page, I realized that with today’s modern languages, I could problably just convert the funky M-Expressions used on page 13 directly into code. So … why not?
Check out his 178 LOC LISP implementation (albeit with a non-LISP Ruby array syntax).
Phusion Passenger — a.k.a. mod_rails — makes deployment of applications built on the revolutionary Ruby on Rails web framework a breeze.
If this works as advertised, I can't imagine how it could not become the default Rails deployment option in a manner of weeks.
So then, I present to you java_inline, a RubyInline builder for JRuby!
It’s probably a lot less useful than its C ancestor — I can’t really think of a good reason why you’d embed your Java code inline instead of putting it into a separate Java source file. But there’s little doubt that this is very cool.
Check out Ebb:
Ebb aims to be a small and fast web server specifically for hosting web frameworks like Rails, Merb, and in the future Django.
Written in C and — if the benchmarks are to believed — very fast.
A presentation on ActiveRecord performance (PDF) by Rowan Hick. I didn’t know about Faker:
Faker, a port of Data::Faker from Perl, is used to easily generate fake data: names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.
[via Ruby Inside]
While Ruby doesn’t have language support for accessing the AST of a piece of code, there are libraries to handle that. The most popular one is ParseTree, which returns the AST as a s-expr representation, i.e. nested lists of symbols and literals.
For the motivated, here’s a cool project idea. Build a Ruby Goodness WS-* API that can use SOAP4R, WSF/Ruby or Axis/J as the underlying stack. I’d love to see something like that.
A great idea. Some input (I know the XML stuff is orthogonal, but still):
For the record, though, I have to say I actually like the WSF/Ruby API — it’s quite low-level, but I believe everybody should have learned their lessons about hiding details by now …