Robert Bazinet is a .NET and Ruby developer as well as a System Architect with over 20 years experience working on small to enterprise-wide system development. He is an independent consultant and founder of the Still River Software Company, LLC with clients ranging from small to Fortune 10 sized companies. Rob lives in Woodstock, CT with his wife and daughter.
Learning a new programming language can be a daunting task and at times difficult to know where to start. Now try to learn a new web framework at the same time and you have a recipe for confusion. We had the opportunity to talk with Michael Hartl about his approach to teaching people Ruby on Rails, his book the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial, and the excellent video series with the same title.
Developers enjoy writing code but few developers enjoy writing exception handling code and even fewer do it right. A new book titled Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm attacks the subject and helps developers take the right approach to solid exception handling code.
RailsInstaller provides Windows developers a great way to easily create Ruby on Rails 3 applications in no time. Up until now, Windows developers would be on their own to setup Ruby, RubyGems, Rails and SQLite in order to begin to create their first Rails application. Thanks to Dr. Nic Williams of Engine Yard and his team, it is much easier now.
DataMapper, an Object Relational Mapper (ORM) for Ruby, arrived at a milestone recently reaching 1.0 status. The release, announced during RailsConf 2010, and coinciding with Dirkjan Bussink's presentation at the conference on the subject.
JetBrains has taken it on themselves to create one of the premier Ruby IDEs on the market. It has been just over 6 months since version 1.0 was released and today, RubyMine 2.0.
It is often the case, a new piece of software is developed by someone who needed to fill a void left by an existing product. Software evolves from tools we use which don't exactly meet our needs, this is the case with a new Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tool called Coulda, developed by Evan Light.
PostRank Labs released an open source version of their Ruby web server framework powering PostRank. Goliath, is an asynchronous server designed for speed, leveraging key features of Ruby 1.9+. Goliath creates fast web and data services not unlike node.js but sticking with what Ruby developers know..Ruby. Discover how easy it can be to create manageable server-side services with Ruby.
Scout is an extensible server and application monitoring service which focuses upon ease of installation and configuration. Scout offers default alerts to help administrators understand how the application is behaving under various loads as well as allowing developers to create plugins to extend Scout.
The Ruby language was first released 14 years ago and since that time as experienced great growth with thanks to Ruby frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. This book covers intricate details of the Ruby language today, including the latest Ruby 1.9.1, and gives developers a solid foundation for creating Ruby applications.
One of the more interesting announcements recently coming to the Ruby community was the release of JetBrains RubyMine IDE for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. The Ruby community is known for not typically using an integrated development environment (IDE) such as .NET or Java developers use. Ruby developers usually stick to plain text editors such as TextMate, Vim and Emacs.
Ruby on Rails has done well since its introduction a few years ago but has taken some criticism for not being able to scale. Developers know there is always a right way and a wrong way to solve any problem and scaling Ruby on Rails is no different. Learn about what is being done to address Ruby on Rails and scaling to the enterprise.
