Ruby link round-up Feb 24 2008

I’ve seen a number of great Ruby articles, tutorials and discussions recently (and not so recently), as well as some interesting projects, so I thought I’d write a quick round-up of links to some of the most interesting stuff. It’s split by category, with a miscellaneous list for stuff that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else.

  • Merb
    • Tutorial on getting up and running with Merb 0.9.0.
    • A list of great Merb articles.
    • An article from Ezra, the guy who created Merb, on using Merb’s integration with Rack to write handlers that run close to the http processing pipeline, while remaining webserver agnostic.
  • Amazon EC2 + S3
    • An article on using Amazon web services, Lucene and Ruby for web crawling.
    • This gem enables really easy setup of EC2 boxes for use with Rails. I’ve tried it. And it rocks.
  • iPhone
    • An article on hosting iPhone subdomains within your Rails app, to display iPhone specific versions of web applications.
    • This article goes into even greater detail on iPhone specific versions of Rails apps.
  • Books
    • Another post from Ezra, who happens to be one of the authors of ‘Deploying Rails Applications’. This post says that the book is now at the final beta stage, and includes some more advanced content such as Apache/Nginx scaling, and Xen setups. I’ve just ordered up the beta PDF, and will be receiving the paperback too when it ships in May. Hoping to do an initial review once I give the beta a read, looks very interesting though.
  • Tools and projects
    • Heroku, online Rails application creation and hosting. Very cool tool for creating or collaborating on a hosted Rails application, all through your browser.
    • Rush, a Ruby based shell, from one of the guys behind Heroku. Interesting concept, along the same sort of lines as Windows Powershell - but because it’s Ruby, it has a much better syntax :-)
    • An article about the usage of Beanstalk, a messaging queue system, to power the Nuby on Rails blog.
    • Hot off the presses, a new Capistrano preview, with some cool features such as better role definitions, and better git integration.
  • Miscellaneous
    • An article on generating feeds using microformats within html.
    • Good post from 37signals about building a web app, and making sure you get it right - even if it means starting over.
    • An article on using Ruby for scripting tasks on Mac OS X.
    • Interesting article on tackling master/slave database setups with Rails.
    • Great screencast on PeepCode about git, a source control tool that is all the rage at the minute. Really good introduction to the tool.
OK so that wasn’t such a quick round-up - but that was the best of the best from the articles and links I’ve come across over the last few months.

amazon • beanstalk • capistrano • coding • ec2 • git • heroku • iphone • links • merb • rails • rb • ruby • rubyonrails • s3 • tech