Dave Thomas on MetaProgramming in Ruby

Over at InfoQ, there’s a nice talk of Dave Thomas at last year’s QCon. He talks about meta programming, and how it’s used in Rails to achieve all the magic that makes it what it is. Not to the tiniest details, but he explains Ruby’s mechanisms which Rails uses to achieve the magic.

A Weird Ruby Bug

I ran across a weird bug the other day that seems to have been fixed in Ruby 1.8.5. It’s nonetheless quite an interesting one. When you use a hash as a method parameter, and that hash happens to contain the key :do and you call the method without parentheses, like so:

Testing Active Web Service with RSpec

I recently started picking up RSpec for a current project. Not too far along the way I found myself wanting to test a SOAP web service written with Active Web Service with it.