Lots of open tabs to be swept. Brace yourselves.

Git

• Git - SVN Crash Course. Coming from Subversion? Lookie here.

• Using git with Django Screencast

• Learning git-svn in 5 minutes

• gitnub. I was really apalled by gitk (but then again, I'm appalled by most tools written in Tk), so this more Mac-style repository browser comes in quite handy.

• Git SVN Workflow

• Railscast - Git on Rails

• Git Peepcode. Of course.

Can you tell I'm looking into Git right now?

Ruby

• Matz' Google Tech Talk on Ruby 1.9. Damn, Google employees have it all.

• MacRuby - Ruby running on Objective-C. A Ruby project by Apple. Awesome.

• Ruby, an AppleScript Alternative. Part #2 and #3.

• Scripting with RubyOSA

• Castanaut: Ruby-powered OS X Screencasting DSL

• Ruby 1.9 with Symbol#to_proc and (soon) curried Procs. You know it from Rails, now this is Ruby standard: :attributes.to_proc.

• Rush - OOP shell in Ruby

Rails

• Tarantula vs. your Rails app. Think of it as heckle for your application.

• count vs. length vs. size. A small tidbit on how each of these methods work on ActiveRecord association proxies.

• Rails is the best thing that ever happened to Python

Mac OS X

• Secrets. An ever-growing list of hidden preferences. Comes with a handy-dandy preference pane.

• ThoughtWorks Podcasts. There are two podcasts available, where Martin Fowler and Jay Fields talk about DSLs.

• Atomic Commit in SQLite. An interesting read, if you're into database internals.

• Live Mongrel Debugging and Recovery. A nice article that also leads to the following entries.

• Mongrel Timeout / Throttle Misnomer. Yep, Mongrel's -t parameter is confusing.

• A Couple of Quick Mongrel Tips. Some nice Mongrel tips.

• Process title support for Mongrel. Now that's just cool. Nice and simple way to monitor at least some basic Mongrel process states.

• TextMate Tip - The Ruby Bundle. Ciarán Walsh regularly posts a bunch of TextMate tips. Well worth reading.

Another week, another sweep.

• Garbage Collection is Why Ruby on Rails is Slow: Patches to Improve Performance 5x; Memory Profiling

• Guerilla's Guide to Optimizing Rails Applications

• SwitchPipe. Supposably an easy way to deploy web applications written in Rails, Camping, Ramaze, Merb and what have you.

• Anvil - Ruby MVC GUI Library

• Tapping Method Chains with Ruby 1.9. A nice gem in Ruby 1.9.

• Static typing considered harmful. While the post itself is spot on, it was more the quote from Stuart Halloway that caught my eye: "In 5 years, we'll view compilation as the weakest form of unit testing." I have nothing to add.

• The Ultimate List of RubyCocoa Tutorials, Tips and Tools.

• Ruby Cheat Sheets

• 21 Merb Links, Tutorials and Other Resources. Kudos to Peter Cooper for putting these lists together.

• Heroku. An in-browser Rails environment. Code, collaborate, click deploy, and see your app running on EC2, all from your browser. Looking forward to giving it a go.

• FancyZoom. My word, that is smooth JavaScript image zooming, Panic style.

• Routes recognition in rails and why speed matters

• Baking those "Special" Kind of Cookies. A more secure alternative to the base64 based cookie session storage in Rails 2.

• Rubular. A Ruby regular expression editor.

• Dave Thomas on the Joys of Life-long Learning

• The Road to Merb 1.0. An interview with Ezra Zygmuntowicz.

• Evan Phoenix on Rubinius

• Scala Tutorials for Java Developers

• Ruby Concurrency, Actors, and Rubinius. An interview with MenTaLguY.

• The case of the plane and conveyer belt. Plane? Conveyor belt? Yep.

• Announcing: SimpleServices. Yes, the enterprise is finally coming to Rails. About time given that Grails already has Spring, and therefore is more enterprisey than Rails.

• PeepCode on RSpec User Stories. The user stories look awesome as a replacement for Rails integration tests. The PeepCode is a good introduction on the topic, but falls awfully short on that issue. Using basic steps like saving an object, checking if it's valid and checking whether it was actually stored in the database is a little bit too simple in my book, and something you shouldn't be testing all that much anyway.

• James Cox on Scaling Rails Apps.

• The state of the Lambda in Ruby 1.9.

• Living on the Edge (of Rails) #3 - X-Sendfile and many other sexy enhancements.

• Howto: Write a Rails plug-in. In case you didn't already know.

• Getting Code Ready for Ruby 1.9.

• Zed Shaw on Audible Ajax. If his rant was too much for you, I'd recommend listening to this. It's a lot nicer to actually hear him talk about all these things.

• Rubinius gets Multi-VM Support. Sweet!

• Protecting custom SQL in Rails from SQL injections.

I bought a nice stack of books recently, and I'm planning on buying some more. There's a lot of good stuff, not only new books, but also some older books (as in from 2004, I'm not talking about the C++ books on my shelf).

Currently reading:

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers. An outstanding book, review soon to come.

On the stack (in no particular order):

• Domain-Driven Design
• Practical JRuby on Rails Projects
• Microformats
• Programming Erlang. Not my new favorite thing, but I want to know what all the fuzz is about.
• Enterprise Integration Patterns. 700 pages on messaging and integration, oh my.
• Manage It!

Yet to arrive or to be bought:

• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Though from 2002 and on some topics maybe slightly outdates it's still a shame I haven't read it yet.
• Deploying Rails Applications. I'm browsing through the beta already. Book due in March.
• The Rails Way
• Design Patterns in Ruby
• Advanced Rails Recipes. Beta PDF already in the browsing process.
• The New PickAxe. Also beta PDF.

Books I'm considering to buy:

• xUnit Test Patterns. More than 800 on refactoring tests. The website already offers a lot of material, but also states that it might've been outdated by the book already.

There's also the occasional novel to be squeezed in. Oh well, lots of stuff to read I reckon. Thank goodness that the weekend is near. Time to read.

Friday's tab sweep for a little weekend reading.

• Rails, and how the opinion can keep back Rails EE
  Interesting opinion on plugin-overflow and blind framework switching.

• Tab Switching in Terminal
  Nice InputManager hack to enable Cmd-1 to 9 for directly switching to tabs.

• BackgrounDRb is growing up
  Well, who woulda thought. The new team switched the communication with the BackgrounDRb server to the more reliable Packet library. More information about the changes for the upcoming 1.0 release on the mailing list.

• Rendering with Erubis and Rails 2.0

• Utility Belt
  Extension kit for IRB, shortcuts for S3, using the clipboard in OS X, using Pastie, and much more.

• Declarative exception handling in your controllers with Rails 2.0
  Neat!

Today's NetNewsWire tab sweep:

• DataMapper - Competition for ActiveRecord - Not available at the moment, cached on the Googles.
  Looks like a nice alternative to ActiveRecord, especially for standalone environments without Rails. Being able to put queries, especially simpler ones, in Ruby code is quite appealing.

• The Great Ruby Shoot-Out
  Antonio Cangiano compared the current Ruby implementations. JRuby, Ruby 1.9 and Rubinius look awesome, at least by the numbers.

• Upcoming Changes to the JavaScript Language
  I'm still not sure if I'm gonna like what's coming. JavaScript is on the way to turning into a full-blown and statically typed object-oriented language, but with all its pros and cons. It looks a lot like C++, and if that's no a little bit scary, I don't know what is.

• Google Chart API
  Now that's a really useful API. Put in your data via HTTP request and get back chart images. Awesome.

• SVNMate
  A TextMate plugin to integrate Subversion, taking the integration further than the Subversion bundle.

• Rak
  grep in Ruby, ignores .svn and CVS directories. Accepts regular expression in Ruby syntax, and can execute Ruby code on the results.

• The Evolution of Java
  Right on.

On a side node, Rails 2.0 has been released. I recommend checking out the PeepCode book on Rails 2.0 to check what's new and what's old.

Update: Ryan Daigle (author of aforementioned book) also has a nice collection on a lot of the changes and new features in Rails 2.0.

• QuickLook and TextMate, sitting in a tree. Makes QuickLook even better. It integrates the TextMate syntax highlighting into QuickLook, and integrates QuickLook into TextMate. Looks pretty neat.

• Ruby Tool Survey
  It's official (as far as this survey goes): TextMate is the number one development tool for Ruby and Rails. That's what I tried to tell the students during the lecture I gave last weekend, but the die-hard Linux fans wouldn't believe me ;)

• Nginx and Mongrel for Rails
  Nice tutorial on how to set up Nginx for Rails deployment. I'm using it on one of my current projects and it's pretty neat. RailsJitsu is well worth keeping an eye on.

• Scripting the Leopard Termina
  Tired of having to open four terminal session each time you open Terminal to work on your Rails applications? Get some nice hints on how to script Terminal with AppleScript to ease the pain on your fingers.

• Inject Ruby into a Running OS X Application
  Just cool. Nuff said.

The RSpec and Behaviour-Driven Development edition:

• Behaviour-Driven Development. An excellent introduction to RSpec and BDD by Bruce Tate.

• Introduction to RSpec by David Chelimsky.

• Developing a Rails Model using BDD and RSpec by Luke Redpath. A year old, but still good for an overview.

• RSpec PeepCode

• RSpec Quick Reference

• RSpec is the Ultimate Bed Check

Have a RESTful weekend with some REST-related reading, some of it already a little older, but it's gotten more important to me recently:

• Refactoring DayTrader to REST. An article on refactoring an existing application to use REST.

• Scott Raymond talks about his experiences on refactoring IconBuffet to REST. Unfortunately his blog isn't working right now. You can find the intro on the homepage and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a cached copy anywhere.

• The RESTful Rails PeepCode. Geoff also made a cheat sheet which always comes in handy.

• RailsCast on custom REST actions. All hail to :new, :member and :collection.

• RailsCast on REST authorization.

• Not related to REST, but still interesting for the Mac geek using QuickSilver, Nikolas Jitkoff gives a tech talk at Google, captured on Google Video for your viewing pleasure.

It's been a week full of Rails joy, and a little pain as well, but that's not to looked for in Rails itself, but just some code.

• Been working with attachment_fu this week. Basically tried out its S3 storage capabilities when I switched from a custom implementation. Pretty neato. I'm starting to dig S3 itself more and more. Mike Clark wrote a nice tutorial on the subject.

• In his newest tutorial on developerWorks, Bruce Tate writes about using RSpec for behaviour-driven testing. Good stuff, I'm looking forward to the tutorial at RailsConf Europe about Behavious-Driven Development.

• Chris Wanstrath introduces Ambition, an ActiveRecord extension that makes finding objects more Ruby-like. Being able to write

  User.select { |u| u.email =~ /chris/ }.first
  

  instead of

  User.find(:first, :conditions => ["email = chris"])`
  

  feels at least a little bit more Ruby-ish. Still pretty new, but it looks promising. The full, glorious joy of features can be read in the README.

• Finally, the Softies on Rails talk about what you always knew deep in your ruby-red heart: Hashes are Cool!

• Chad Fowler and Marcel Molina are holding a full-day Rails testing tutorial on the day before the sessions of RailsConf Europe. That would be September 17th. You're expected to fork over $75 for the entry, but fear not, the money is for a good cause and the donation is tax-deductible.
• A while ago Ola Bini called for an implementation of Hibernate for JRuby. Johan Andries is giving it a try: ActiveHibernate on Google Code (via InfoQ)
• A year after the initial listing on their website, The Pragmatic Programmers announced "Deploying Rails Applications". Written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz (of BackgrounDRb fame) and Bruce Tate it aims to offer all kinds of wisdom about running Rails applications in the wild. It's still in beta, but I know I'm gonna grab a copy.
• Adding time zones to a Rails application is something I was doing this week. Of great help were the introduction by Jamis Buck and an article by Courtenay of caboose fame

• WestCIV, makers of the fabulous Style Master CSS Editor, introduced a neat tool called XRAY to inspect any website in your browser without any extra tools. While I'm perfectly aware that FireBug can do that too, let me just state that I don't use Firefox as my main browser. XRAY might come in pretty handy, if you don't have the tools you normally use, at hand.
• Amy Newell sums up 10 things you should know about method_missing rather nicely.
• Edge Rails adds support for partial layouts. DRY up that partial code, I say.
• Happy Third Anniversary, Rails. I think I speak for a lot of us when I say that you brought so much joy and passion back into our complexity- and heavyweight-infested lives.
• Atlassian acquires Cenqua. It's about time that two Sydney-based companies building most excellent tools finally go hand in hand.