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Useful Methods

Ben Lewis wrote an article about Five Ruby Methods you should be using. He covers Object#tap, Array#bsearch, Enumerable#flat_map, Array.new with a block, and the sort operator (a.k.a. spaceship).

Metrics That Matter

Chris Kottom published an article covering a few of the code metrics that he feels don’t necessarily matter, like 100% code coverage. He focuses on a few that do, including performance, complexity, and security.

sprockets-traceur

The sprockets-traceur gem by Adam Pohorecki allows us to use the new features from ECMAScript 6 in Rails apps today, before the next version of JavaScript is officially released. Since a lot of Rails apps tend to make heavy use of JavaScript, it’s good to be able to try out some of these features sooner than later.

Toxiproxy

The team at Shopify recently released a new library for tampering with network connections called Toxiproxy. It provides a TCP proxy system which can be used to simulate network and system conditions.

email_prefixer

The email_prefixer gem by Ryan Sonnek automatically adds a prefix to the subject line of all delivered emails in development and staging. Great use of ActionMailer::Interceptor, a feature added in Rails 3.1.

Phone verification using SMS via Twilio

Santosh Wadghule published a guide on how to perform phone number verification in your Ruby application using the Twilio API. Who needs CAPTCHA? I’m just gonna TEXTYA!

Sponsored by Ruby5

Ruby5 is released Tuesday and Friday mornings. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

• Follow Envy Labs on Twitter
• Or, subscribe with iTunes or RSS

This episode was co-produced and edited by audio guru Jamison Rabbe.

Sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs

If you’re looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.

Ruby 2.2.0 Released

Ruby 2.2.0 was released on Christmas day, containing a bunch of new features and improvements. The new garbage collector is now able to collect Symbol type objects, reducing memory usage of Symbols. This new version has reduced pause time for garbage collection thanks to the Incremental Garbage Collector. Rails 5.0 will take full advantage of both of these features, when it eventually comes out sometime in the Fall of 2015, requiring Ruby 2.2 or greater.

Rails 4.2.0

Rails 4.2.0 was also released over the holidays. There’s AdequateRecord, the painstaking multi-year rewrite of ActiveRecord led by Aaron Patterson to improve the performance of ActiveRecord beyond what it was in Rails 2.3 days, which means a lot.There’s also ActiveJob, which was originally planned for Rails 4. It brings a centralized interface for queuing jobs for any queueing systems like Resque, Sidekiq or Delayed Job. There’s also Web Console which gives you the ability to run queries you would usually run in the rails console, but right inside the browser when an exception occurs, which is similar to the better_errors gem. And now, adding and removing foreign keys is properly supported in Rails migrations.

Finishing Moves

Every now and then you find yourself in a situation where Ruby doesn’t have that one method you need. For example, a nil_chain method, which allows you to write method chains without fear of tripping over a NoMethodError and NameError exception when something throws out a nil value. Sometimes you just want to call something if it exists, and not if it’s nil. The folks over at Forge Software wrapped up a bunch of these useful methods into a gem called “Finishing Moves”.

RubySpec

On new year’s eve Ruby Hero Brian Shirai wrote a blog post explaining why he is ending the RubySpec project. RubySpec is a set of specifications, or tests, on how Ruby is supposed to run that was taken out of the Rubinius project. The objective was to have a common set of tests, not written in C, that could be run against any Ruby implementation to see if it had all the right behavior for Ruby. The reason why RubySpec is no longer is quite contentious but it seems like collaboration on the project wasn’t optimal between Ruby implementation. There was already a fork from people working on the MRI implementation that tackles some of the issues with RubySpec itself. At the very least we can, we can all agree that knowing how Ruby should behave matters.

Broader discussion available at: https://gist.github.com/nateberkopec/11dbcf0ee7f2c08450ea

Databound

Domas Bitvinskas dropped us a line yesterday to let us know about Databound, a Ruby gem that provides JavaScript a simple API to the Ruby on Rails CRUD. Basically it provides you a simple way to write ActiveRecord like functions directly from your JavaScript. So you can do things like User.find(1) from your JavaScript methods, and Databound will take care of calling into your Rails app to find the user with an ID of 1. You don’t even need a controller for the models you want to be able to query for, if you don’t already have one. All you need to do is write a line in your routes file specifying the model you want to be able to query for, and the columns you’re permitted to set from your JavaScript calls. This could be really useful if you want to write more code on the front-end, and less on the back-end.

How to test controllers in Rails

Occasionally it’s nice to cover a beginner tutorial, and we’d like to mention Cezar Halmagean’s tutorial on testing controllers in Rails. Controllers can be pretty easy to test assuming you know how to stub out calls and set expectations properly. Otherwise they can mimic your integration tests, which is not very useful.

Remembering James Golick

Thanks for everything you did James.

Sponsored by Ruby5

Ruby5 is released Tuesday and Friday mornings. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

• Follow Envy Labs on Twitter
• Or, subscribe with iTunes or RSS

This episode was co-produced and edited by audio guru Jamison Rabbe.

Sponsored by Top ruby Jobs

If you’re looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.

Streem

Ruby’s creator is working on a new stream based language. It’s in its early days but is clearly influenced by Ruby.
It is a concurrent scripting language based on a programming model similar to shell, with influences from Ruby and other functional programming languages. Currently, it’s still in the design stages.

Rails 4.2.0 Release Candidate

The Rails team has just released the third Release Candidate of Rails 4.2 today. Major changes include – Active Jobs, Asychnonous mails, Adequate record, web console, and foreign key support. So far, there haven’t been any major regressions for this release, meaning that we are still on track for our target to release the final version of 4.2.0 before Christmas time.

Papercrop

Papercrop is a gem from rsantamaria. It’s an easy extension for Paperclip to crop your image uploads using jCrop. It’s quite simple to use – there are 2 form helpers (cropbox and crop_preview). Cropbox places an adjustable crop area over the image being cropped and crop_preview renders a small preview of your finished image. Just a note – make sure you allow for additional params when using strong parameters

RubyMotion 3.0

Last Friday, RubyMotion announced the official release of version 3.0. Since the release of the beta, they’ve been hard at work adding some updates. Most notably, they now support all versions of Android. There’s a bunch of new features too. A debugger interface and a spec framework have been added but it doesn’t stop there. 3.0 let’s you write Apple Watch apps with Watchkit, create iOS 8 integrations, iOS 64-bit support, and an overall application size reduction.

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