Sebastien Auvray is a JEE/Java software developer and have been working for various financial institutions. While being an old fan of Python, his main interest of the moment is Ruby/RoR with several upcoming projects based on Rails. Sebestien also publishes on The Nameless One about software and programming languages.
Since Linus Torvalds presentation at Google about git in May 2007, the adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems has been constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of Distributed Version Control, see when to use it, why it can be better, and have a look at three actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar.
TDD and BDD are now widely-used software development techniques. However, solely following TDD & BDD may still lead to missed business opportunities, or worse, a negative impact to the business. Two questions which TDD & BDD are unable to answer are: How do you measure the usage of your application? How do you get feedback from your customers? Is Experiment-Driven Development (EDD) the answer?
DocumentCloud is a non-profit organization which provides document-based applications. With highly expensive processing tasks to accomplish in parallel, DocumentCloud decided to implement its own cloud solution in Ruby: CloudCrowd. InfoQ spoke with the author, Jeremy Ashkenas of DocumentCloud, to learn more.
Code quality tools for mainstream languages have reached a certain level of maturity, but tools for Ruby are still growing and become more important as Ruby spreads from early adopters to the early majority. InfoQ takes a look at the available code quality tools in the Ruby space.
Embedding C in Ruby or Rails applications is a way to fix performance bottle necks. RubyInline made this easy for C. Mark Wotton recently created Hubris, a bridge which makes it possible to call Haskell code from Ruby.
Managing SQL-based scripts can become a nightmare with time. Rails solved this with ActiveRecord Migration. Sam Livingston-Gray wrote a small standalone Ruby tool to generate hierarchical migration script. Based on the fact that SQL scripts can become very verbose and duplication-prone, Sam started SQrbL which is a mix of SQL and Ruby.
Ruby has long been criticized for 1.8's limited green threads. Luc Castera gave a presentation at RubyNation about Concurrent Programming with Ruby and Tuple Spaces. He introduces 2 ways of implementing TupleSpaces in Ruby: Rinda and Blackboard using Redis (with plans to porting it to Erlang).
Part of the Ruby language was influenced by functional programming techniques. Larry Diehl brings a declarative concurrent model to Ruby by importing the concept of unification from Oz Language with the Dataflow project.
There are many ways to develop, test and integrate your Rails application: from TDD with the basic Test:Unit or ZenTest, to BDD with RSpec, Shoulda or Cucumber. Remarkable tries to unify the syntax and adds some more flavors to make your Rails BDD painless.
