Have you ever yearned for something like Rails's script/console or Merb's merb -i in your other Rack based apps? If so, then Marcin Kulik's racksh, inspired by Heroku's console, might be for you.
Racksh: A Rails-Console-A-Like for Rack-Based Ruby Apps
Jekyll: A Ruby-Powered Static Site Generator
Jekyll is a simple Ruby-powered static site generator, originally by Tom Preston-Werner (aka mojombo) of Github fame. It's focused around blogging, but it can be configured to generate any kind of static site. (Note: Jekyll has been around for about a year - Tom originally...
Riot: for fast, expressive and focused unit tests
Riot is a new Ruby test framework by Justin Knowlden that focuses on faster testing. Justin was frustrated with his slow running test suites, despite employing techniques such as using factories, mocks and avoiding database access. He realized that a slow-running suite makes one reluctant to run it or...
Mustache: Logic-Free Views For Your Ruby Web Apps
Mustache (or GitHub repo) is a new templating library from Chris Wanstrath (a.k.a. defunkt of GitHub fame) that provides a way to render views in your chosen Ruby web framework. Influenced by ctemplate, Mustache helps to keep your MVC layers separate by actively preventing the inclusion...
Watchr: A Flexible, Generic Alternative to AutoTes
Watchr is a continuous-testing tool by Martin Aumont in the vein of Autotest (part of the ZenTest package).
At its heart, Watchr basically watches any (or all!) of your project's files, then executes arbitrary Ruby code of your choice when things change. Watchr configuration takes such a form:
watch('pattern') { |match_data_object| command_to_run...Coulda: A Cucumber-like DSL for BDD
Evan Light has recently pushed his Coulda project to Github - it's a test framework based on Test::Unit, inspired by Cucumber, Shoulda and Thor.
Coulda works like Cucumber in that it's a Domain Specific Language for capturing the behaviour expected by your code, as part…
Review of The Merb Way by Foy Savas
I've been reading the Merb Way by Foy Savas (Addison Wesley). I was a little sceptical about this book at first, because of the recent marriage of the Merb and Rails core teams and the announcement that the Merb codebase would be…
CouchRest: CouchDB, Close to the Metal
I have been contemplating the use of document-stores in my Ruby apps for a few months (you might remember my MongoMapper post from back in June), and I've been following developments in the No-SQL movement. George Palmer's presentation at Rails Underground on his couch_foo gem inspired me...
Gemcutter: A New Gem Hosting Repository Taking Aim At RubyForge and GitHub
Gemcutter is a new gem hosting repository that aims to replace RubyForge as the canonical repository for gems. The project has been around for a couple of months, but Thoughtbot recently announced they're helping out with a forthcoming redesign of the site.
As part of...
Monk: A Ruby Glue-Framework for Web Development
I recently came across the interesting-looking Monk framework. It allows you to specify a list of dependencies for technologies to use in your project (in the form of git repositories or gems), and it will take care of extracting them into your application's vendor folder.
With the default skeleton (for...
Whois: A New Pure-Ruby Whois Gem
Simone Carletti of Altura Labs recently announced on his blog the release of a new pure-Ruby Whois library, inventively named "Whois".
He needed a whois library for one of his projects, but found that the existing options didn't satisfy his requirement of being able to query both IP addresses and top...
Bowline: An MVC Framework for GUI Apps in Ruby
Bowline is a new MVC GUI framework for developing cross-platform desktop applications using Ruby, HTML, CSS and Javascript. The author, Alex MacCaw, aims to make building a desktop app as simple as creating a Rails site.
Unlike pure Ruby desktop libraries like Shoes, Bowline builds on
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