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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.

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.

While using Ruby for your projects, you may need some references.

These are some references that might help you in using Ruby:

• Language

General Syntax Rules

• Comments start with a pound/sharp (#) character and go to EOL.
• Ruby programs are sequence of expressions.
• Each expression is delimited by semicolons(;) or newlines unless obviously incomplete (e.g. trailing ‘+’).
• Backslashes at the end of line does not terminate expression.

Reserved words

alias   and     BEGIN   begin   break   case    class   def     defined
do      else    elsif   END     end     ensure  false   for     if
in      module  next    nil     not     or      redo    rescue  retry
return  self    super   then    true    undef   unless  until   when
while   yield

Type

Advanced Rails offers you an in-depth look at techniques for dealing with databases, security, performance, web services and much more.

O’Reilly Media, Inc. published an intermediate-to-expert Rails book, authored by Brad Ediger:

Chapters in this book help you understand not only the tricks and techniques used within the Rails framework itself, but also how to make use of ideas borrowed from other programming paradigms. Advanced Rails pays particular attention to building applications that scale — whether “scale” means handling more users, or working with a bigger and more complex database.

Design Patterns in Ruby documents smart ways to resolve many problems that Ruby developers commonly encounter. Addison-Wesley Professional press has this exciting book, authored by Russ Olsen.

Russ Olsen has done a great job of selecting classic patterns and augmenting these with newer patterns that have special relevance for Ruby. Most design pattern books are based on C++ and Java. But Ruby is different—and the language’s unique qualities make design patterns easier to implement and use.

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is a great book for Ruby and Rails developers seeking to create compelling business intelligence and reporting solutions using a wide variety of applications and services. Published by Apress, and the author is David Berube.

Business intelligence and real-time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward-looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.

The goal of Portable Ruby is to reduce those updates to a single place, your USB drive. About.com describes how to make this possible:

Installing Ruby

The easiest way to setup a Portable Ruby application is to start with an existing Ruby installation. I recommend the One-Click Installer. If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and install it.

The entire Ruby distribution is created in a single “ruby” directory structure. Additional changes include the creation of shortcuts for the start menu, which we will simulate in the PortableApp menu. The One-Click Installer also updates the Windows PATH environment variable to include the ruby\bin directory.

The latest entry in Addison-Wesley’s Professional Ruby Series is The Rails Way, by Obie Fernandez, is a long awaited book billing itself as the “expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications.”

More precisely, the book dives into nearly every area of the Rails libraries and APIs and acts as a reference work for them. Coming in at about 850 pages, the book is physically very similar to The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. There’s no denying that these two books look good next to each other on the bookshelf, and a lot of comparison can be made between the two.

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
• Active Record: XML in, JSON out
• Active Record: Shedding some weight

IronRuby implements Ruby in the .NET runtime VM, with excellent performance and seamless integration with .NET libraries and infrastructure. A fast, compliant Ruby powered by .NET.

IronRuby is a .NET implementation of the Ruby programming language. IronRuby heavily leverages Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime, and both are released with full source code under the Microsoft Permissive License. The IronRuby source code is hosted on Rubyforge, which is a home for open source Ruby projects.