Ruby on Rails

Ruby User Groups (RUGs, for short) are typically informal organizations put together to encourage Ruby developers with certain areas to get together, share ideas, and, often, to have some fun. If you're lacking for inspiration or want to get to know some Rubyists within certain parts of the world (or just around the corner, if you're lucky), heading to a Ruby User Groups' meeting can open a lot of doors. But how can you find them?

Vagrant is a Ruby-based tool for building and deploying virtualized development environments. It uses Oracle's open-source VirtualBox virtualization system along with the Chef configuration management engine along with lots of Ruby goodness to automate the creation and provisioning of virtual machines for development purposes.

JRuby is undoubtedly the most mature of the alternative Ruby implementations. Supporting Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 (mostly!) and JIT compilation, JRuby is already in use in mission critical Ruby apps and runs scarily fast on the JVM. In this interview with JRuby core member, Charles Nutter, we dig deep into what makes JRuby tick.

New Relic's RPM, an application performance monitoring and reporting system, has today announced it has added full support for Sinatra and Rack-based Ruby applications to its traditionally Rails-centric service. It's been possible to hack in support for non-Rails apps into New Relic before, but this move brings them officially into the fold with all of the features only Rails apps used to be able to take advantage of.

Over on the Ruby Best Practices blog, Robert Klemme walks through the process of building a new numeric class from scratch in Ruby - taking into account all the gotchas and considerations that pop up along the way. Robert's task is harder and more involved than you'd initially suspect.!