Chef is billed as “A systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure”. It doesn’t matter how many times I read that, I still hear a ‘whoosh’ over my head. Put simply, we can manage…
Continue Reading… You’ve probably noticed a few articles as of late on SitePoint and its properties discuss Heroku and their offerings; they’re definitely shaking things up in the cloud services arena! In fact, I recently wrote an article myself discussing Heroku’s database-as-a-service offering, Heroku…
Continue Reading… Building authentication for applications is a run of the mill task we have all encountered at some point or another. In the past, most developers would have reached into their tool belt and pulled out restful authentication. Lately, a new kid on…
Continue Reading… In the previous article we thinly disguised a Rack tutorial as a comparison of PHP and Ruby. The aim of the article was to point out that most PHP developers start out on a pretty well thought out learning trail. We head…
Continue Reading… rbenv is a tool that lets you install and run multiple versions of Ruby side-by-side. It’s a simple, lightweight alternative to RVM that focuses solely on managing multiple Ruby environments. Each version of Ruby is installed in the ~/.rbenv/versions directory. It uses…
Continue Reading… You see gems everywhere in the Ruby world. They are the backbone of just about every Ruby app out there. I’ll admit that I was a bit intimidated the first time I tried to create a gem, but I soon found out…
Continue Reading… If you’ve ever developed something using Ruby then you know it’s a blast to use. It flows well, reads well, and has lots of cool ways to get things done. Beyond the day-to-day APIs you might be used to, there lies a…
Continue Reading… In the last article we had a whistle stop tour of blocks. How they are defined, what purposes they serve and the differences between various Ruby versions. It was all very academic. But practically what benefit do we actually get from blocks.…
Continue Reading… In Part 2 of this tutorial, we used DataMapper to save tasks to a database back end and created a web front end that used Sinatra to show, add, delete and complete tasks. In this tutorial we will make it look a…
Continue Reading… Welcome back to Metaprogramming with Ruby! In part one we looked at what Metaprogramming is and how it works; we explored deep into the internals of Ruby’s method lookup system and walked through how creating Singleton Classes fits into that mechanism. Now for the good part: applying it all.
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