From Phusion, who is responsible for the rails deployment system, Passenger, announced the release of DebGem a powerful tool for RubyGem to APT conversion. With many system administrators preferring to use the APT package management for everything they wish to do on their systems, DebGem allows RubyGems to be packaged differently for deployment on Ubuntu and Debian. The addition of support for the two repositories, allows more flexibility and control, previously quite difficult solely with RubyGems. Read more

Intelligent productivity enhancing development tools are some of the most powerful tools available to the many Ruby and Rails developers all over the world and with the release by JetBrains of RubyMine 1.0, it just got a whole lot better. Hailed as one of the best IDE’s yet to come out for use by developers, it has received quite a lot of attention since it was released partially last November. The development tool that is RubyMine performs a very comprehensive analysis of the whole project code and offers a sort of suggestions list as to the best-in-class code that till now hasn’t been seen in the world of Ruby. Read more

As the world turns, so does the commercialization of Ruby and Rails that have been going on two-pronged approach with respect to the strategies startups in the IT field who focus on them have been targeting. This goes to show that there is money to be made in open-source, ruby being one of the earliest forms of frameworks for open-sourced development, has been embraced and loved by many of their sponsors for more commercialized use. Read more

The two are fighting over rights to the source code of Cisco’s products which have embedded code that makes them work which Cisco is denying to the many users of their products who may wish to modify their programming. Cisco is a major proponent of the Linux Kernel and the fight is seen as a conflict of interest for Read more

Ruby on Rails and Merb has been trying to out do each other for a long time, trying to convince users to come over to their side. Well, today there is only one side as both have buried the hatchet and joined each other to form Rails 3.

We all realized that working together for a common good would be much more productive than duplicating things on each side of the fence. Merb and Rails already share so much in terms of design and sensibility that joining forces seemed like the obvious way to go. All we needed was to sit down for a chat and hash it out, so we did just that.

What this will mean in practice is that the Merb team is putting their efforts into bringing all of the key Merb ideas into Rails 3. Yehuda Katz will outright join the Rails core team, Matt Aimonetti will work on a new evangelism team, and Carl Lerche and Daniel Neighman (hassox) will be co-starring the effort to bring all this over. We’ve immortalized the merge with plaque page at rubyonrails.org/merb.

Always give peace a chance, I say.

Source

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It is quite interesting to recall how David Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails came up with this simple yet powerful tool for developers and programmers alike. Hansson, a native of Copenhagen has built an entire framework aiming to help simplify all the complexities of programming. And help developers save more time and energy thus be more productive with their work. It was his belief to look for alternative ways around the standard IDEAS of computer science that influence the work of programmers. This has led to so many complex product design, that would in turn lead to further complexity. He did not think of creating a complex framework for Google engineers to flock to. He instead concentrated on creating simple designs that would modify the database which developers face every time.

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Ruby Migrations support all the basic data types like string, text, integer, float, datetime, timestamp, time, date, binary and boolean.

• string is basically used for small data types such as a title.
• text is used for longer pieces of text data, such as the description.
• float is used for decimals.
• integer is used for whole numbers.
• date and time is used to store either the date only or time only.
• boolean is used for storing true or false values.
• binary is used for storing data like images, audio, or movies.
• datetime and timestamp is used to store the date and time into a column.

Rails Migration activities can be done using any front end GUI or direct on SQL prompt. Rails Migration makes all those activities very easy. Valid column options are: limit (:limit => “50”), default (:default => “blah”), null (:null => false implies Not Null)

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Last year was an exciting thrill for the techies and developers alike, when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released. And with full support for Ruby and Rails included in the OS package. It seems that the Ruby on Rails train is still rolling with Apple. Some of highlights of Apple, using Ruby in its package, that you might have missed out includes:

• The iPhone Configuration Web Utility - A tool written with Ruby on Rails allowing its user to manage iPhones.
• The SproutCore JavaScript framework - Which is designed for making desktop-like applications on the web and is used in Apple’s new MobileMe applications. Fyi: SproutCore is not a Ruby project, but it does offer some good tie-ins to the system.
• The MacRuby project - Apple’s own port of Ruby to the Objective-C runtimes - which should make it much easier to integrate with Cocoa for Desktop development.
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Ruby on Rails is great for acquiring ideas prototyped super quick. These tips will slow down growth and make apps less portable, but definitely progress the speed your system
Ruby on rails coding style:
• Try to evade the over indulgence use of helpers since it adds overhead.
• You may think about using memcached to cache your model and library computation results.
• Use a custom configuration file for passwords and API keys instead of keeping them in your Subversion repository. Use YAML and mirror the style of database.yml.
• Use constants when desired. Instead of repeating strings like the address of your customer service reply email, set it once in a constant (in environment.rb or the appropriate environment file) and use that throughout your application.
• Keep time in UTC. A no brainer, and easy to do.
• Don’t loop through ActiveRecord models inside other models. Use keen loading if you need to exertion with multiple associated models. Better yet, write a custom SQL query and let the database do the work for you.