Some ruby bits...

10.Nov.2007

This has been a very busy weak, specially due to a lot of university assignments. Nothing too hard, but long and tiring anyway.

In the meantime, RubyConf 2007 was happening in the US and Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, right after. And while that, several news from some interesting ruby projects were being brought to me. So lets share some bits:


Heroku

Heroku is an hosting environment for Ruby on Rails development. Their idea is to concentrate all the development steps in a easy platform to work with. And that means, an online IDE, instant deployment each time you change your code, an interface for generators and migrations, collaboration from different users, and some more features. The service is still in closed beta. I’ve already sign up and I’m currently waiting for a chance to take a look inside. In the meanwhile, you can check out all the demo videos on their features page.

Heroku

Although I don’t expect this to change the face of web development, as I don’t see anyone doing much programming on a simple online IDE, it’s a great tool for quick debugging and an easy environment for newcomers.


IronRuby

This is not a particularly new project, but following the Python .NET implementation, named IronPython, a new version for Ruby start being built, IronRuby. It aim is to have better performance and integrate the .NET libraries and infrastructure. The source code is at RubyForge and there’s a quick video explaining how to get started with the implementation.


Sinatra

Sinatra is another ruby web framework. However, while camping is like a lighter version of rails and still includes many libraries from it, Sinatra’s doesn’t come with any support for databases, although you can add it later, and it’s meant for the simplest applications possible. It does come with sessions support, erb and Haml (which I already wrote about). A quick hello world example:

Sinatra

# hello.rb
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  "Hello World from Sinatra!" 
end

And just run ruby hello.rb and check out http://localhost:4567 in your browser. Pretty neat.

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