EventMachine is a simple(ish), fast, event-driven I/O library for Ruby. Its goal is to provide highly scalable I/O performance with an easy-to-use API wrapped around the nastiest parts of the process (since typical Ruby coding practices aren't particularly event-driven friendly). Aman Gupta has put together an awesome 114-page deck of slides (also available as...
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Want to develop a Mac OS X app without getting waist deep in Objective C? MacRuby is the answer, and it’s now mature enough to use directly from XCode to build fully-featured Ruby-powered Mac apps. “Jean Pierre Hernandez” of Phusion presents a walkthrough of how to do it, step by step.
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Vagrant is a Ruby-based tool for building and deploying virtualized development environments. It uses Oracle's open-source VirtualBox virtualization system along with the Chef configuration management engine along with lots of Ruby goodness to automate the creation and provisioning of virtual machines for development purposes.
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Ruby Best Practices is a book by Gregory Brown (and published by O'Reilly) that looks into the "Ruby way" of doing things in the Ruby language and, specifically, why Rubyists tend to write Ruby the way they do. It's an engaging book and we took a look at it and interviewed Gregory Brown about...
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Harmony, from Martin Aumont, is a new Ruby DSL for executing JavaScript and DOM-using code from within Ruby apps. Why's that cool? Well, it enables you to build your own Ruby-level unit tests for JavaScript code within your Web applications - everything can be under one set of test suites!
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Toto (GitHub repo) is a new lightweight Ruby and Rack-based blogging engine designed specifically for "hackers" by Alexis Sellier. Content is managed entirely through Git - so everything is version controlled - and articles are stored as text files with embedded YAML metadata. At only 300 lines, it's easy to hack to your...
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One of the biggest benefits of bringing Merb developer Yehuda Katz on board to work on Rails 3.0 has been his relentless pursuit of extracting out all of Rails' magical abilities from their monolithic encasings and into separate, manageable chunks. A case in point is ActiveModel, a new library that provides the model...
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Cramp (GitHub repo)is a new, asychronous evented Web app framework by Pratik Naik of 37signals (and the Rails core team). It's built around Ruby's EventMachine library and was designed to use event-driven I/O throughout - making it ideal for situations where you need to handle a large number of open connections (such as Comet...
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CoffeeScript (GitHub repo) is a new programming language with a pure Ruby compiler. Creator Jeremy Ashkenas calls it "JavaScript's less ostentatious kid brother" - mostly because it compiles into JavaScript and shares most of the same constructs, but with a different, tighter syntax.
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Friendly is a new Ruby ORM (a la ActiveRecord) that lets you easily use NoSQL ideas on regular database engines, such as MySQL. Developer James Golick has written a blog post introducing Friendly that goes into detail on how it works - with code examples. Effectively you get schema-less, document-like storage (with indexes!)...
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