When I pair with Railsbridge attendees or new developers, I often wish I had a visual way to let them see the connection between the files in the codebase and what’s rendered in the browser. Today Ruby 5 featured Xray and a number of friends contacted me about checking it out. In no time I [...]
RubyGems
Write Ruby API’s with Stripe’s Poncho (a DSL for REST interfaces) right
As we said in a previous post: WE LOVE STRIPE! The team at Stripe has open sourced a RubyGem that makes REST API’s easy to create, Poncho. It’s compatible with any rack-based framework — like Rails or Sinatra. Best of all, it has a slew of (simple to use) features: Standard Params: integer, array, boolean, [...]
Cache ActiveRecord models in Memcached with IdentityCache by Shopify right
Today Shopify open sourced a core piece of our infrastructure: identity cachegithub.com/Shopify/identi…— Tobias Lütke (@tobi) March 7, 2013 As the quote says, Shopify took a step to open source their solution for caching ActiveRecord model objects in Memcached. An elegant solution backed by a powerful data store, IdentityCache has already been used in production. It’s [...]
Ghost means never having to touch ssh/config again (either) right
As a throwback to our original coverage of Ghost back in 2010, I wanted to share a hidden feature I just discovered in Ghost. Two years ago Felipe Coury submitted a pull request to add ghost-ssh to manipulate ~/.ssh/config files. If it weren’t for Google pointing me to this pull request, I would have never [...]
Better Rails development with better_errors! right
If you are anything like me (a Rails developer that enjoys good design), you will be glad to know that there is a project out there to make the default error pages for Rails development much cleaner! The standard features are simple, and pretty much just a polished version of what Rails offers out of [...]
Virtus – give your Ruby objects DataMapper-like attributes right
I’ve written a few wrappers for various JSON APIs, and each time I’ve had to make a decision about how to represent API data in Ruby. Ruby hashes and arrays work well but bracket['notation'], can be hard on the eyes and fingers. My go-to library for these types of objects is often Hashie, the hash [...]
t – Powerful command line interface for Twitter right
As regular listeners know, I love Earthquake, the super awesome text mode Twitter client from jugyo (十行). What Earthquake is to the streaming API, t from Erik Michaels-Ober is to REST API in the command line. Erik and I have helped maintain John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem for a few years now. While John included a [...]
noexec – Run Ruby scripts without bundle exec right
We’ve covered a few of Josh Hull’s projects on this blog. His latest is so simple, yet quite useful. If you use Bundler, you probably spend a good part of your day running bundle exec. I even use a zsh alias be for this purpose. Well now, we can stop. With noexec, Josh has created [...]
OmniAuth goes 1.0 right
OmniAuth, everyone’s favorite multi authentication provider released version 1.0 this week. As Michael outlines in the official blog post, the biggest changes are: Authentication strategies are no longer in OmniAuth core, but reside in their own gems. This means there is no gatekeeper for implementing a strategy for a given service. A basic bare-bones identity [...]
Episode 0.5.9 – Ruby gems with Nick Quaranto
Wynn sat down with Nick Quaranto at Red Dirt Ruby Conference to talk about Gemcutter, RubyGems.org, and how to get started creating your own Ruby gem. Items mentioned in the show: Nick Quaranto, creator of Gemcutter which is now RubyGems.org Gemcutter is the Ruby community’s gem hosting service. Tom Preston-Warner, founder of GitHub RubyForge was [...]
Summer Breeze: creates dynamic Rails fixtures for Jasmine tests right
On stage at Red Dirt Ruby Conference, Noel Rappin has released Summer Breeze, a gem that makes working with Jasmine in Rails a bit easier. Summer Breeze dynamically creates Rails fixtures for your Jasmine tests. Installation and usage To install via RubyGems: gem install summer_breeze … and run the bundled generator: rails generate summer_breeze:install Now [...]
teamocil: Ruby and YAML-powered terminal layout manager for tmux right
It’s a bit ironic that as a UX developer I spend most of my time in the terminal. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for new tools that improve my command line user experience. My latest find is Teamocil a nice Ruby gem from Rémi Prévost that manages your tmux layouts. For those new [...]
hitch: Git author attribution helper for pair programmers right
Pair programming is like flying F-14s, and not just because our profession enjoys the same rock star status. Just like Maverick and Goose, one dev flies, and one is pretty much the Radar Intercept Officer, having a more dedicated view of threats including syntax errors and stray whitespace. But just like there are two names [...]
govkit: Open Government APIs in a box right
In the same way that Fog aims to be the “Ruby cloud services library” by providing an all-in-one bundle of wrappers for popular cloud services including Amazon, Rackspace, and others, GovKit from OpenGovernment is a Swiss Army Knife of government API wrappers. GovKit currently supports: OpenCongress, which has an API for federal bills, votes, people, [...]
vain: Check GitHub user stats from the command line right
With a name reminiscent of Ego, the at-a-glance traffic/followers/subscribers checker for iPad and iPhone, comes vain, the GitHub followers/watchers/forks checker for the command line from John Crepezzi. Vain is distributed as a Ruby gem: gem install vain You can then get the skinny on any GitHub user with vain <username>. Normally we include example terminal [...]
A pair of gems to create and expand goo.gl URLs right
Now that Google has released an API for its goo.gl URL shortening service, command line geeks have a couple of options to create short URLs without opening a browser. google_url_shortener Developed by Josh Nesbitt at Stac, google_url_shortener is a handy command line utility to create and expand goo.gl URLs. Install via Rubygems gem install google_url_shortener [...]
betabuilder: Ruby gem makes iOS ad-hoc builds suck less right
Behind most every App Store download, there is a painful trail of ad hoc beta builds as developers send beta bits to users to gather feedback and fix bugs. Luke Redpath, UK Rubyist and iOS developer, aims to ease that pain for iOS developers with BetaBuilder, a Ruby gem that bundles up a collection of [...]
rawler: Crawl your website and find broken links with Ruby right
Need a quick-and-dirty way to find broken links on your web site? Rawler from Oscar Del Ben is a Ruby gem that gives you a command line tool to crawl your site, looking for errors. Install via Rubygems: gem install rawler For usage, just execute the command rawler –help: ~ » rawler –help ~ 255 [...]
Episode 0.4.4 – Ruby 1.9, Nokogiri, and tender lovemaking with Aaron Patterson
Wynn caught up with Aaron Patterson, aka @tenderlove, to talk about Ruby 1.9, Nokogiri, and muscle cars. Items mentioned in the show: RubyCommitters.org lists all the folks who hack on the Ruby language Nokogiri is a library for parsing XML and HTML The origins of tenderlove, Aaron’s online persona Hot linking, check it and see. [...]
grape: a Ruby DSL for making APIs right
If you’re writing a web service and you’d like to expose an API to the world, few things are simpler than running a Sinatra application to provide one. Grape, by Michael Bleigh, is one of those things. Grape builds on top of rack, but gives you versioning, automatically providing responses in multiple formats, and other [...]
multi_xml: Flexible and fast XML parsing in Ruby right
An overlooked part of writing a good API wrapper is picking the right parsing library. It’s often a choice between speed and complex platform dependencies. Gems like MultiJSON from Intridea are valuable in providing a common interface to swappable JSON parsers, letting users of your library choose the best fit for their application. Erik Michaels-Ober [...]
WatchWednesday for 20100929
It’s Wednesday again, time for us to serve up another quick list of projects to watch on GitHub. These are projects you might have missed or should could keep an eye on. Heroku::Autoscale David Dollar makes automatically scaling your Heroku dynos a snap with this gem. Simply add the gem to your Gemfile gem ‘heroku-autoscale’ [...]
oauth2_provider: Make your Rails app an OAuth v2.0 provider right
With the likes of Facebook, GitHub, Gowalla, and others adopting OAuth 2.0, client libraries have been popping up everywhere. If you want to join the cool kids and OAuth2-enable your API, where do you start? ThoughtWorks Studios has released oauth2_provider, a Rails plugin to provide OAuth2 authentication to your app. Install via RubyGems: $ gem [...]
ACLatraz: Redis-powered access control for your ruby apps right
Authentication options get a lot of press these days, but there is another Auth that can still be a pain: Authorization. ACLatraz from Kriss Kowalik caught our eye because it’s inspired by *nix Access Control Lists (ACLs), powered by Redis, and has a sense of humor. Install ACLatraz via Ruby gems gem install aclatraz and [...]
terminitor: Automate your terminal workflow on OSX right
As developers, we live in the terminal, often in several tabs per project for tasks like application consoles, database interfaces, or monitoring test output. If you’re on OSX, Arthur Chiu from the Padrino team wants to make your life a bit easier. Terminitor lets you define workspaces and workflows for projects, allowing you to script [...]
Mailman: If Sinatra worked at the post office right
As part of the Ruby Summer of Code, Jonathan Rudenberg has released Mailman. Mailman aims to provide the classy Sinatra declarative style for handling incoming mail: Mailman is a Ruby gem so it’s easy to install: sudo gem install mailman Then you’re ready to start handling some mail: require ‘mailman’ Mailman.config.maildir = ‘~/Maildir’ Mailman::Application.run do [...]
OAuth2: Ruby wrapper for OAuth 2.0 right
OAuth 2.0, which aims to simplify OAuth flow, is still a work in progress, but wrapper libraries are already shaping up thanks to interest in Facebook’s support. Michael Bleigh’s gem provides a nice Ruby wrapper for OAuth2. sudo gem install oauth2 … and use it like so: require ‘rubygems’ require ‘sinatra’ require ‘oauth2′ require ‘json’ [...]
OpenGraph – Ruby library for Facebook’s new API right
[Updated]: Thanks to Michael’s correction in the comments below and more caffeine it’s apparent that Michael released two entirely unrelated Facebook gems yesterday. Also, as Mike points out, the example in this case is hypothetical since IMDb does not yet support OpenGraph. OpenGraph is a way to let web publishers turn ordinary web pages into [...]
Twurl – OAuth-enabled curl for the Twitter API right
OAuth is cool but developing with OAuth can be a pain. Inspired by curl and Hurl.it (featured on Episode 0.1.5 with Leah Culver), the Twitter team has realeased a couple of tools to make developing with the Twitter OAuth API much easier. Twurl is a Ruby gem from Marcel Molina that lets you make requests [...]
gemwhois – WHOIS for Ruby gems right
In a passing comment on IM Wynn told John Nunemaker how he loved the 404 page on Gemcutter. The next morning, the world woke up to gemwhois. Now you can see who owns or is squatting on your favorite gem name: $ gem whois httparty gem name: httparty owners: John Nunemaker, Sandro Turriate info: Makes [...]