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It’s not just Rails 2.0 but another added bump in the minor version

There are thousands (literally, considering the Subversion revision numbers of improvements, including:

• Action Pack: Resources
• Action Pack: Multiview
• Action Pack: Record identification
• Action Pack: HTTP Loving
• Action Pack: Security
• Action Pack: Exception handling
• Action Pack: Cookie store sessions
• Action Pack: New request profiler
• Action Pack: Miscellaneous
• Active Record: Performance
• Active Record: Sexy migrations
• Active Record: Foxy fixtures

microformats has been only two years old, yet it has brought significant changes in a relatively short time.

What is it, actually? According to microformats.org, “[microformats is] designed for humans first and machines second, [they] are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”

Enough with the fluff, let’s see how it actually works, microformats in action:

Flickr picture source

The above picture is me browsing to the LinkedIn profile of one of Indonesia’s renowned Ruby on Rails experts, Arie Kusuma Atmaja. The overlay window that contains these semantic information is not a LinkedIn feature. Rather, it is the easily usable, cross-browser Microformats Bookmarklet by LeftLogic. Go on… try it if you haven’t!

NetBeans 6 Beta 1 is here!!

Let’s rock the boat

It’s the first significant NetBeans event in probably a year

NetBeans isn’t only for Java geeks anymore, it has tons of Ruby and Ruby on Rails support now!

What surprises me (and delights me!) about this release is that, not like previous NetBeans 6 milestones where NetBeans-Java is bundled with Ruby, they actually make a special Ruby-only version.

The Ruby-only download is mere 19 MB in size!

Tau gak twitter tuh punya API

Ini contoh penggunaannya:

ceefour@ojalanow:~/bin$ salsabeela 'untuk sekarang enak gini'
Sending salsabeela 'untuk sekarang enak gini' '.... OK!
ceefour@ojalanow:~/bin$ salsabeela 'gak perlu mandi tiap hari '
Sending salsabeela 'gak perlu mandi tiap hari '.... OK!
ceefour@ojalanow:~/bin$ cat salsabeela
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/twitter_pm"
send_pm 'salsabeela', ARGV.join(' ')

isi twitter_pm.rb :

ceefour@ojalanow:~/bin$ cat twitter_pm.rb
require 'rubygems'
gem 'twitter4r', '>=0.2.0'
require 'twitter'

def send_pm(recipient_id, message)
t = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'gauldong@gmail.com', :password => ****************)
message = ARGV.join(' ')
sent = false
begin
recipient = t.user(recipient_id)
rescue
raise("Cannot find user #{recipient_username}")
end
print "Sending #{recipient.screen_name} '#{message}'"
$stdout.flush
sending = Thread.new { t.message(:post, message, recipient); sent= true; }
status = Thread.new { until sent; print '.'; sleep(0.5); $stdout.flush; end }
sending.join
status.join
puts ' OK!'
end

We’ve got a great language, Ruby. We’ve got great libraries. We’ve got great frameworks (including Rails.)

Last but definitely not at least, and simply the most important, is that we’ve got a great community.

So where do we go from here? For example, from the Ruby Indonesia mailing list, id-ruby…

Let me summarize this post in one excellent illustration courtesy of Creating Passionate Users:

What follows, is a verbatim concatenation of each of Kathy Sierra and friends’ related articles. Beginning with the one that includes the above picture.

I love this presentation:

The slide tells shows a lot of ideas about:

• Designer – Programmer/Developer collaboration
• Good design principles
• Use Rails optimally
• The philosophy of web development
• How to go from concept to development to production
• Did I mention lots of ideas!!??

Seriously, don’t walk, but run to download that thing!!

Some people lucky enough to be in a large corporate requiring enterprise-quality software with redundant databases will love this: Magic Multi Connections by the genius Dr Nic. (fanfare please!)

The problem is simple:

• How to connect a Rails app to more than one database.

The answer solution is also simple:

• [almost] 75-line Rails plugin (+ gem) called Magic Multi Connections.

Dr Nic Williams himself wrote a very interesting Magic Multi Connections tutorial. And DHH suggested that Twitter should probably use it.

Connection pooling and database clustering is a relatively complicated subject. But I’d say this plugin solves about 80% of the problem in 2% of the code.

A very nice article by Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks. When you read it from a customer/client/procurer/corporate perspective, it’s quite revealing.  Allow me to quote specific parts that I like:

… JRuby offers the choice of just deploying into a Java container, turning a Rails app into an easily deployed war file. I think this will make Ruby on Rails a much more viable choice in lots of enterprise environments.

There seems an excellent chance that Ruby and Rails could become a significant platform for IT develop over the next few years. We’re already seeing signs of this at ThoughtWorks – 40% of our new business this year in the US is Ruby work.