Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #25

By Peter Cooper

A handful of random Ruby links, articles, and resources to end off the week..

Is It JRuby? - Track which gems work on JRuby

Is it JRuby? is a "fork" of Brightbox's Is It Ruby 1.9 that focuses on JRuby. As with the Ruby 1.9 site, Is It JRuby lets you track gems, allowing you to mark them as either working or not working with JRuby (yet) or to track reports from others. Remember that since these sites are community driven, the reports should never be taken as gospel and simply used as guidelines.

Ruby Enterprise Edition's 3rd Sponsorship Campaign

The Phusion guys (behind the awesome Passenger / mod_rails) are looking for contributions to their third sponsorship campaign for Ruby Enterprise Edition. If you're not already aware, Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE) is a specially patched/adapted version of the MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) that uses less memory, has a tweaked garbage collector and memory allocator, and several other performance enhancements. The target this time is $9000 and they have about $6000 left to go.

As an aside, Mike Perham's article, Memory-hungry Ruby daemons, demonstrates how REE can prove useful in reducing memory use on long-running daemons.

MacRuby - Changing the Ruby Ecosystem?

In MacRuby, Changing the Ruby Ecosystem, Matt Aimonetti writes about how MacRuby - the Apple sponsored, open source, Objective C driven Ruby implementation - fits into the Ruby ecosystem and, ultimately, how the big developments coming along could change it. Key points include MacRuby's rubyspec compliance, that MacRuby doesn't require OS X, and MacRuby's potentially explosive performance.

Beginner's iPhone Programming Workshop for Rubyists

Dan Grigsby of leading iPhone development Web site Mobile Orchard is putting on an iPhone programming workshop in Toronto on July 9-10, just as FutureRuby kicks off. If you're going to FutureRuby and fancy learning about iPhone development from a great teacher, this is a great chance. Even if you're not going to FutureRuby but are interested in the topic, check it out.

Sketches - When Your Code Changes, It Gets Reloaded!

It's easier to steal their already fine description, so.. Sketches allows you to create and edit Ruby code from the comfort of your editor, while having it safely reloaded in IRB whenever changes to the code are saved. As the name implies, this could prove pretty handy for basic "sketching" and prototyping of lightweight code.

Engine Yard Takes Over Ruby 1.8.6 Maintenance

With both Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1, poor old Ruby 1.8.6 has been left in the dust support-wise. Despite this, it's still the most popular Ruby implementation out there and a lot of people depend on it. Given this, hosting company Engine Yard's team of engineers have decided to take over the legacy maintenance duties. Hats off to them!