Looking to learn Ruby programming language? You’re lucky: The Book of Ruby, fresh from the oven 3rd Edition has been published by No Starch Press. Written by Huw Collingbourne, the developer of Ruby in Steel IDE, so it’s quite a special treat.

The book contains 425 pages in 20 chapters, while quite short it explains well a lot of the Ruby programming language constructs that you will use everyday.

Ruby development learning materials covered are as follows:

Assembla.com is an online software development version control and management tool. The site includes an SVN/Subversion/Git/Mercurial/CVS repository hosting, a complete ticketing system, a collaboration tool and a management tool.

Certain features of the site can be used for free, but to use the entire suite of tools requires a paid subscription to the site. The site uses 128-bit encryption for free and paid users, and all data is stored on secure Amazon servers. The ticketing system incorporates task tracking, issue tracking and bug tracking. The collaboration tool includes a wiki, a message board and shared files. The software repositories offered by the site require no setup and offer seamless integration with the ticketing, collaboration and management tools.

What do you get when the power of Ruby on Rails is combined with flexibility of Merb web framework? Rails 3 of course!

We have a very happy news: Rails 3 Beta is ready for testing. The improvements are numerous: ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActionView, and ActionMailer, ActiveSupport have all been redesigned. ActiveRecord got pimped with ActiveRelation scoped queries.

Some components have been refactored into their own: ActionDispatch, ActiveModel. Even better, all components can be used alone and you don’t have to require the entire Rails framework.

Rails is now not only Rack compatible, but subcomponents of Rails, like routing, are Rack middlewares.

How do you feel during your daily Ruby programming workflow? Do you feel fun or productive? Either way, you’ve got to feel grateful!

After several years not doing any serious PHP programming, today I get curious.

Right now, PHP has evolved. PHP programmers are not “script kiddies” anymore, they’re professional programmers with quality MVC web frameworks.

Now it won’t be fair if I compared Ruby on Rails with PHP, as that’d be like comparing apples and oranges. So I have to pick some killer app written in PHP that competes directly with Rails, as long as it’s not WordPress or Drupal.

A Ruby on Rails web application I’ve been developing uses Dojo-based full AJAX frontend. I learned some new tricks during development, relearned old pitfalls, and found some mistakes that I’d like to share with you.

Aquarium is a framework that implements Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) for Ruby. The premise of AOP is that some concerns in an application will cut across the natural object boundaries of the problem domain. Rather than scatter duplicated code in each object to handle the cross-cutting concern, AOP modularizes the specification of which execution points are affected (called join points) and the actions that should be invoked at those points.

New in V0.4.0: Preliminary support for advising Java classes in JRuby! See the discussion here.

See also the RubyForge project page.

Just got a server hard drive crash

We should be back operational soon. In the mean time please bear with us. Thank you.