January’s Analogue Blog is brought to you by Ian’s ‘Cyber Pen’ and features Mongo, a funky structured/unstructured db idea, bundler, hosting, hosting and more hosting, ruby koans, fish shell, a test framework voxpop, and more!
ShRUG 2 – January 2010
Mongo – Document DB and more…
MongoDB is a document DB with extra features. MongoMapper is a rubygem for using Mongo with ruby.
Dual db idea by James & Jon
James was using Mongo to implement an idea for a Model which is backed by both a SQL and DocumentDB style DB (using ruby’s magic to simply forward any attributes that are not known by the SQL layer to the DocumentDB layer). Why? You can have a ids and structured data when you need it, and have ad-hoc data for consumers of the model when they need it. Sounds like an upcoming ShRUG preso.
bundler – Gem dependency management
Bundler is a tool that manages gem dependencies for your ruby application. It’s by Yehuda and will probably replace Thor, Merb’s gem dep manager.
Hosting options
EC2 layer that costs $99 per month + EC2 costs. It softens the blow for seting up and automatically provisioning EC2 resources.
$20/month for the cheapest slice. Super easy to setup – you can get an empty *nix distro up and running in minutes. No contracts. They also have DNS servers and an API (in ActiveResource) for managing slices & DNS.
FiSH
Modern *nix shell. Also check out Ben Hoskings fork with some extra goodies.
Capybara (again)
See last months AB for details. It’s here to stay, oh and cucumber has had 2 minor releases since last Month’s meeting.
Test framework voxpop
The question was asked: what test framework? Of the 5 peeps who do testing with ruby…
- rspec: 5
- test unit: 0
- shoulda: .05
Most shruggers agree that rspec has quite a big mindshare beyond just rails.
For railsers, check out remarkable which is a port of shoulda’s DSL stuff for rspec.
Cucumber is becoming less coupled to rails. Aslak’s new gem is an extraction of all of the rails-specific stuff that was in cucumber.
Heroku 1.9
Ashley’s campaign for Heroku support for ruby 1.9 is successful. Post ShRUG 2 it seems they are adding support next month for ruby 1.9!
Ruby Koans
Is an excellent resource for learning ruby. It’s basically a big failing test suite, with some sugar that guides you through it on the path to ruby enlightenment…
“learn the rules so you know how to break them”
Rubeh in’t Rough
Suggestion that NWRUG, Leeds ruby thing, and ShRUG join forces to bring a ruby conf to the North of England…