There have been some sad developments within the Engine Yard Rubinius team that I’d like to address head on. Earlier today, I had the unfortunate task of reducing the team size to 2 people, which meant laying off the rest of the team.

We moved this site to Webby in hopes that we’d blog more if we didn’t have to leave TextMate to do it. Along the way, we fell in love with this little gem.

Waxeye makes language development easy and fun. It uses scanner-less parsing, grammar testing, automatic AST generation and language independent, modular grammars. Currently supports C, Java, Ruby and Scheme.

I've talked to lots of PHP and Java programmers who love the idea and concept of Rails, but are afraid of stepping in because of Ruby. The argument goes that since they already know PHP or Java, that it would be less work to just pick one of the Rails knockoffs in those languages. I really don't think so.

Ruby is an easy-to-learn, dynamic, object-oriented programming language with dynamic typing and automatic memory management. This refcard provides a quick reference to language elements and many important API functions for quick lookup.

A few tips on how to cut the time your spend developing new projects in Ruby on Rails

There are lots of great JavaScript libraries out there. Prototype is one of the best and it ships along Rails as the default choice for adding Ajax to your application.

With the growing trend towards dynamic languages hosting on the JVM and Sun's financial problems growing, is Java (the platform) becoming irrelevant and transforming simply into a no-named platform for proprietary solutions?

The e-book version of the Pragmatic Programmers release Rails for PHP Developers written by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny occupies now some of my scarce hard drive space for several months, and today I managed to hit the last page of it. In case you're interested in knowing if it's worthy to sacrifice some rare hard drive or bookshelf space for this book read on.

NeverBlock now enables concurrent Ruby network operations that are much faster than threaded ones. An explanation of Ruby's socket hierarchy and how it was modified for NeverBlock support. Also benchmarks against simulated back ends.

Are you guilty of subconsciously regarding ’scripting’ languages as inferior? Do you think real programming means using C, C++, C#, or Java? Does your conscience accuse you of laziness when you feel tempted to use a truly high-level language for your app?

A little over a year ago, I then discovered Groovy and Jruby. Both languages were very elegant, and I could see how they could both boost my scripting productivity dramatically. I therefore compared both languages for my scripting tasks, and, in the end, I determined that Groovy was just a better language. Here’s part of my rationale [...]

You didn't think we had forgotten Ruby, did you? Here's a new Ruby editor feature: Detecting duplicate hashkeys. As "Fjan" (who filed the request) says, when some Rails calls allow dozens or more keys, you can accidentally add a hash key twice, with subtle results. NetBeans now tracks these down and points them out for you.

There is no such thing as parallelism in Ruby. Instead of thinking in threads, you should think about process parallelism, due to the Global Interpreter Lock - a look at what that means and why.

Now that I've got a few Ruby on Rails projects under my belt, I finally feel qualified to comment on Rails front-end coding conventions. As a UI specialist coming to Rails from the JSP world, I find a lot of room for improvement in the RoR approach to view-layer code. I love working on the non-view aspects of RoR projects, but I find I've got to do tons of cleanup at the ERB layer. Expect to see some open-source components from Pathfinder to help ease this pain. In the meantime, let me articulate my pain points:

This article is based on a talk I gave at the 2008 RubyConf in Orlando, Florida, entitled “Recovering from Enterprise: how to embrace Ruby’s idioms and say goodbye to bad habits”.

Real world scraping scenario with a simple Hpricot example.

In the NetBeans 7.0 (dev) you may attach debugger to any process which have been started from the command line, with all the goodies of UI debugger frontend. This means that if you just found some strange behaviour or bug in some CLI tool or you are just curious how e.g. gem list, rake -T, etc. commands work, just run then in debug mode from a terminal and attach to them from the frontend.

# Sequel provides thread safety, connection pooling and a concise DSL for constructing database queries and table schemas. # Sequel also includes a lightweight but comprehensive ORM layer for mapping records to Ruby objects and handling associated records.

A growing number of static analysis tools has become available for Ruby. InfoQ looks at Flay, flog, Roodi, Rufus, Reek, all worthy candidates to add to your continuous integration setup to keep your code lean, mean and smelling only of roses.

Umm, w00t! It’s been a little over two years since merb was a twinkle in my eye, and a pastie. Since then it has undergone many drastic transformations, working its way towards a very solid, fast foundation for people to build their homesteads on.

Merb - a much heralded, highly flexible Ruby-based Web application framework - has reached version 1.0 after two years of development. Congratulations to Merb's creator, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and to the large group of associated developers (such as Yehuda Katz and Matt Aimonetti) who've kept adding features and pushed Merb forward to be a significant alternative to Rails.

"[...] Pay attention to the development community online, and you’ll quickly notice a few non-mainstream programming languages appear over and over again. I’m referring to languages like F#, Erlang, Haskell, Scala and Clojure. [...]"

My personal site has been through a number of transitions. It was initially a flat/traditional/simple PHP based site with a custom ORM layer. Then I decided that I spent longer maintaining the site and wanted to blog more so I changed to using Serendipity. After a while of still not writing many posts and not updating Serendipity for a while my site got hacked. I'd always advised my clients of the risks of using open source software - that you have to keep it updated otherwise a security vulnerability found in the software means you are one evil mind and a google search away from being hacked - and then ignored that advice myself.

A few simple benchmark of various Ruby implementations + a comparison with Lisp (SBCL).