It's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-)

Rails 3.2 Released DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of Rails to support Ruby 1.8. Read More

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, my Ruby e-mail newsletter.

Vote for your 'Ruby Hero' in the Ruby Hero Awards The Ruby Heroes awards run each year and present 6 community nominated 'heroes' with an award at RailsConf. Nominations are now open so go and drop your nomination for the Rubyist whose code has brightened up your life the most in the past year.

Heroku Receives InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award Sorry it's just a press release but it's great to see a company that came up from the Ruby world continue to do well. Read More

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter. While I have you, be sure to follow @RubyInside on Twitter as I'm going to be posting news more frequently there than on the Web site in future.

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Also, if you're interested in getting one interesting programming related quote or link each day on Twitter, check out @codewisdom.

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RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic RSpec 2.8 and rspec-rails 2.8.1 have been released and some users have been reporting significant performance improvements. Other tweaks include improved documentation, better tag and filtering options, random example execution, and 'rspec --init' for adding RSpec to an empty Ruby project. Read More

RSpec 2.8 has been released, along with rspec-rails 2.8.1 for the full Rails 3.x integration experience.

RSpec is a BDD-focused testing tool that's particularly popular in the Rails world where everyone except DHH is using it (if you believe the hoopla). RSpec has faced accusations of being less than speedy in the past, but it seems 2.8 has had a performance firework shoved up its tailpipe:

David Chelimsky, the creator of RSpec, also notes that in RSpec 2.8:

• the documentation has been significantly improved
• there's improved support for tags and filtering
• random example running order support (with user definable seed)
• rspec --init will create a spec directory and some starter code on a blank project - ideal for Ruby library development!
Read More

Ruby Weekly has just tipped over 10,000 subscribers but I know not everyone is into getting their news via e-mail, so here's the latest frequent roundup of the latest Ruby and Rails news for you, all on the Web :-)

Hungry Academy Application Process Closes This Weekend LivingSocial's 'Hungry Academy' will provide a paid, on-site 5 month Ruby and Rails learning experience and mentorship program to a small group of lucky applicants. Interested? You've only got a few days left to apply.

DOS Attack Vulnerability Found in Ruby 1.8's Hash Algorithm Ruby 1.8.7-p352 and earlier are affected by a wide reaching (as in Python and Java are also affected!) hash related vulnerability. Read More

Recently Forbes wrote about the rise of 'developernomics', noting that companies are seeing programmers as a 'safe haven' investment in otherwise troubled times. Maybe.. maybe not.. but the Ruby and Rails job market is as hot as ever, so if you're looking for a new position, be sure to negotiate well! ;-)

To promote a job, see our Post A Job page. Your listing not only ends up on the Ruby Inside and RubyFlow sidebars but also in the 10114 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free (as a bonus) and on our 7305 follower @rubyinside Twitter account.

FreeAgent, the pioneers in web-based accounting, is looking for a senior engineer to join their engineering team in a brand new office in beautiful Edinburgh. Read More

Ruby isn't known for its game development chops despite having a handful of interesting libraries suited to it. Java, on the other hand, has a thriving and popular game development scene flooded with powerful libraries, tutorials and forums. Can we drag some of Java's thunder kicking and screaming over to the world of Ruby? Yep! - thanks to JRuby. Let's run through the steps to build a simple 'bat and ball' game now.

If you're part of the "meh, JRuby" brigade, suspend your disbelief for a minute. JRuby is easy to install, easy to use, and isn't going to trample all over your system or suck up all your memory. Read More

Sinatra Up and Running is a new book published by O'Reilly and written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse that covers the popular Sinatra web application DSL in a brisk 103 pages, acting as a tutorial to newcomers and a handy reference for old hands.

TLDR: It's a short, sweet, relatively cheap and very well written book about Sinatra. Recommended. Buy here.

An interesting quirk of Scandinavian society is the concept of Jante Law. It knocks down standing out and being individual, in favor of communal harmony. It's typically used in a negative context to lament restrictions and lack of risk taking within Nordic society (DHH touched on this briefly in a recent Mixergy interview) but the flip side of the Jante coin is lagom: the idea and ideal of having just the right amount of something. Read More

Ludum Dare is an online accelerated game development event that focuses on regular 48 hour competitions. Think Rails Rumble but for games! It's been around since 2002 but has had a big publicity boost recently due to the participation of Notch, the creator of the mind-bogglingly popular indie game Minecraft.

The next Ludum Dare contest is taking place this coming weekend between December 16-19, 2011 and I want to encourage Rubyists to take part. The competition tends to be dominated by Java, Flash, Microsoft XNA developers, and HTML5 developers, so it'd be great to see more Ruby entries (of which there have only been a couple so far). Read More

2011 is drawing to a close and I have been reminded of a post I made about a year ago: Ruby in 2010: A Retrospective of a Great Year for Ruby. 2010 was a stunning year with the release of Ruby 1.9.2, MacRuby 0.5, Sinatra 1.0, Rubinius 1.0, and DataMapper 1.0!

This year, MagLev, Capybara, Cucumber, RefineryCMS, OmniAuth and TorqueBox all hit their 1.0 milestones, but I've dug through the archives to see what else 2011 brought for the Ruby scene.

Rails Installer: Ruby and Rails on Windows in a Single, Easy Install - Wayne E Seguin, of RVM, released a super simple Rails, Git, SQLite, and Ruby installer for Windows. Read More

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly - it's bumper sized this week. And a big congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, as he got married recently!

Sinatra: Up and Running (New Book from O'Reilly) A new book from O'Reilly, written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse, that takes a look at the popular Sinatra Ruby webapp library. It's available in e-book and print formats.

awesome_print 1.0 Released OK, it's already at 1.0.1, but Michael Dvorkin's awesome 'pretty printer' for Ruby objects has reached its 1.0 milestone. This is definitely one of my favorite Ruby projects.

Method Chaining and Lazy Evaluation in Ruby Ever wondered how that ActiveRecord query style method chaining works? Read More

It's a couple of days late but here are the main headlines from the last week of Ruby news. We have a couple of Rails releases, some event news, and the usual gaggle of great articles and jobs.

Rails 3.1.3 Released (Very Quickly After 3.1.2) This release mainly contains fixes for regressions that popped up in 3.1.2, including a downgrade to Sprockets. 3.1.2 itself was primarily a bug and security fix release and cleared up a XSS vulnerability in the translate helper.

Rails 3.0.11 Released (clears up aforementioned security vuln too)

Matz says 'Autoload will be dead' (in Ruby 3.0) Matz says he should have removed 'autoload' from Ruby when he added threads to the language but he has now deprecated them. Read More

After last week's bumper set of releases the Ruby world seems a lot quieter this week :-) (Even here. I've been hidden away teaching my Ruby Reloaded course!)

RSpec 2.8.0 RC1 Released The next significant release of RSpec is afoot and its first release candidate is now out. Key improvements come to configuration (and being able to override it from the command line) and running examples in random (and pseudo-random) order.

Ruby 1.9.3-p0 RubyInstaller for Windows Available RubyInstaller is a popular route to installing Ruby for Windows users, and a new version based on the all-new Ruby 1.9.3-p0 is now out. Read More

In math, a unary operation is an operation with a single input. In Ruby, a unary operator is an operator which only takes a single 'argument' in the form of a receiver. For example, the - on -5 or ! on !true.

In contrast, a binary operator, such as in 2 + 3, deals with two arguments. Here, 2 and 3 (which become one receiver and one argument in a method call to +).

Ruby only has a handful of unary operators, and while it's common to redefine binary operators like + or [] to give your objects some added syntactic sugar, unary operators are less commonly redefined. Read More

The Ruby standard library (a.k.a. stdlib) is a collection of Ruby libraries that, at one time or another, have been considered useful enough to include with the MRI Ruby implementation by standard. Due to the popularity of these libraries, other Ruby implementations have then tended to re-implement or include the standard library too.

As part of the march toward Ruby 2.0, the state of Ruby's 'standard library' has come up for discussion. A popular line of thinking (and IMHO, very likely to actually happen) is that the standard library should be 'gemified' for Ruby 2.0. Read More

The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue given the quality of this week's releases: OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters!

Ruby 1.9.3-p0 Released The first production-ready release of Ruby 1.9.3 is finally here with patchlevel 0's release this week. I've already covered what's new on Ruby Inside (see the link below) but this is a nice step forward for MRI and worth checking out, especially if you want faster Rails loading times. Read More

Recently, there have been many screencasts of people coding things in real time. Yesterday, Ryan Bigg released a video of him implementing Conway's Game of Life from scratch by reading through the 'rules' and then using RSpec to take a test driven approach to fleshing out the functionality.

Ryan is a Ruby Hero and technical writer best known for being co-author of the recently released Rails 3 in Action (along with Yehuda Katz) which I'll be reviewing soon for Ruby Inside. Read More

This week brings us a new JRuby release, some Ruby 2.0 news (but you knew that already, right? ;-)) and a new BDD library that seems to have struck a chord with the people I'm following on Twitter. Also, my Ruby Reloaded course is now also over half booked out so if you're curious, definitely check it out now.

Without further ado, here's a round up of the top Ruby news and releases from the last week, courtesy of Ruby Weekly:... Read More »

Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 "release manager" and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0's release. You can read the full post here.

The short version of the timeline? Read More »

Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 "release manager" and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0's release. You can read the full post here.

The short version of the timeline?... Read More »