Now Ruby's on the Nintendo Wii

#​690 — February 15, 2024

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

The Plan for Rails 8— There’s been a fair amount of buzz around the Rails 8 feature announcements, such as less of a need for Redis, no more Sprockets, Rack 3 support, and more progressive web app features (like push notifications). Exciting stuff.

Brad Gessler (Fly.io)

RunRuby.dev: Run Ruby (and Bundler!) in the Browser— Last week, we linked to Yusuke Endoh's emirb which uses WebAssembly to run IRB in the browser. Svyatoslav Kryukov has upped the ante here, providing more of an editor plus a clever workaround to get Bundler working too. 🐦 This Twitter/X thread has more information about how he did it, plus a link to the source.

Svyatoslav Kryukov

❤️ Postgres— You need a database provider that loves Postgres as much as you do. We'll take care of all the hassle - monitoring, backups, HA, disaster recovery so you don't have to. Want amazing support? We'll be there when you have questions.

Crunchy Bridge sponsor

• 🥳 mruby 3.3 has been released (release notes). The lightweight, embeddable Ruby implementation takes some gentle steps forward and adds support for... MS-DOS and the Nintendo Wii?

• 🗣 George Kosmopoulos recaps the Ruby-related talks from the recent FOSDEM event, with links to the videos for each.

• 🤖 We stumbled across ▶️ this rather odd 'documentary' of Rails' evolution narrated by an AI clone of David Attenborough's voice...

• 📱 TurboNative.Directory is a rapidly growing catalog of iOS/Android apps backed by (largely Rails powered) web views – you can submit your own, too.

▶  So You Think You Know Git..— GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon gave an engrossing talk at FOSDEM 2024 earlier this month that’s well worth 45 minutes of your time. He dug into lots of interesting areas of git and associated techniques, as well as a few GitHub bits and pieces. If you don’t have 45 minutes, good news – there’s a set of blog posts covering it all, too.

Scott Chacon

📕 Articles & Tutorials

Turbo Sortable Paginated Tables in Rails— A look at how easy it is to build responsive, sortable paginated tables with Rails and Turbo Frames nowadays sans JavaScript. Avi has written a run of interesting Turbo-related posts lately with Turbo Frame Search Filters and Turbo Frame Slide Over also worth a look.

Avi Flombaum

What It Was Like Working for GitLab— A detailed retrospective of the author’s experience working at GitLab, as well as a little conflict he feels over GitLab’s use of Ruby and Rails. (If you recognize the name, Yorick used to work on Rubinius and the Oga gem.)

Yorick Peterse

That’s Some Funky Stuff—Who’s Going to Work on That? 😅— Solving strange, complex problems in legacy codebases is our specialty. Let’s make things more maintainable, so your team moves faster.

Test Double sponsor

Anonymous Block Forwarding in Ruby— Did you know you can forward blocks anonymously as of Ruby 3.1? It’s all in the power of the &.

Akshay Khot

tap vs yield_self— yield_self is perhaps more commonly known through its then alias and is ‘more awesome than you could think.’

Suraj Mishra

▶  Digging into View Transitions with Turbo 8 and Rails— A quick code and demo-led screencast in 7 minutes.
webcrunch

Rails 8 to Introduce Built-in Rate Limiting API
Yedhin Kizhakkethara

🛠 Code & Tools

SuperDiff 0.11: View Differences Between Data Structures in RSpec— When you’ve got something that’s expected and what actually came back, distinguishing the difference between them can be tricky. This makes it easier.

Elliot Winkler

dotenv 3.0: A Gem to Load Environment Variables from .env— A long-time Ruby classic that has seen some fresh activity this week, and now requires Ruby 3.0+. Note that dotenv-rails is now considered superflous, since the Rails features have been rolled intodotenv proper. GitHub repo.

Brandon Keepers

🌳 Need to Upgrade Rails on a Tight Budget? Try Bonsai by FastRuby— Starting at $2,000/month, Bonsai is the cost-effective way to gradually modernize your Gemfile, Ruby, and Rails 🚀

Bonsai by FastRuby.io sponsor

Extralite 2.7: Ruby on SQLite, But Better— With great performance and a clean API, Extralite is becoming our SQLite library of choice for Ruby, and things have gotten even better with support for prepared queries and value transforms now making it in.

Sharon Rosner

Letter Opener 1.9: Preview Mail in the Browser Instead of Sending— No longer worry about accidentally sending test emails to real addresses while in development.

Ryan Bates et al.

Dynamoid 3.10: A Ruby ORM for Amazon DynamoDB— Get an Active Record-esque ORM for Amazon’s flexible DynamoDB database service.

Dynamoid

Savon: A 'Heavy Metal' SOAP Client— A long standing SOAP client library. The latest release requires Ruby 3.0+. There’s also Wasabi, an associated WSDL parsing library.

Daniel Harrington

Forme 2.5: HTML Form Generation Library— A structured way to create HTML forms with no external dependencies and a simple API.

Jeremy Evans

• Crack 1.0– Simple JSON and XML parsing, ripped from Merb and Rails.

• assignable_values 1.0– Restrict the values assignable to Active Record attributes or associations.

• google-dfp-api 3.0– Google's official Ad Manager SOAP API client library.

• CronCalc 1.0– Calculates job occurrences from cron expressions.

• Good Job 3.24– Postgres-backed job queue for Rails.

• cypress-rails 0.7– Easier Cypress testing for Rails apps

• Stripe Ruby 10.8– Ruby library for the Stripe API.

• redis-rb 5.1– The Ruby client library for Redis.

• Nori 2.7– XML to hash translator.