Rails turns twenty

#​714 — August 1, 2024

Read on the Web

🏖️ Hey! Just a quick note to say that we're taking next week off for a brief summer vacation. We'll be back with our next issue on August 15.
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Ruby Weekly

How It Became Like This? Ruby's Range Class— An exploration of one of Ruby’s core classes — specifically the Range type and its associated syntax, looking at how it works and how its behavior has evolved over time.

Victor Shepelev

Developer’s Guide to Heroku Dynos— Which dynos should you use, and how many? (TLDR: Don’t use Perf-M!)

Judoscale sponsor

Heroku Ruby Cloud Native Buildpack (CNB) Tutorial— A 2024 update for Heroku’s tutorial for building a Rails app image with no Dockerfile required. And, no, you don’t need to use Heroku to run or deploy it (indeed it runs locally).

Heroku

IN BRIEF:

• 🎂 Ruby on Rails was first released in August 2004, making it twenty years old this month!

• The Ruby team has announced two DoS vulnerabilities in REXML (second one) and recommends upgrading to REXML 3.3.3+.

• Ruby 3.2.5 has been released due to the aforementioned REXML issues, but also includes other bug fixes for those on the 3.2 branch.

• It's great to see Lucian Ghinda's Short Ruby newsletter has reached issue 100. It takes a different approach to us, focusing heavily on what Rubyists are discussing on Twitter.

• Did you know that as of Java 22 you can run Java source files in a similar way to how you'd run Ruby?

• ⌨️ After getting into Windows, Linux, and Vim, DHH's next odyssey is mechanical keyboards.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

Multiplayer Minesweeper with Rails and Hotwire?— We recently featured a post about implementing Minesweeper in 100 lines of Ruby, but what if we could make it multiplayer? Radan pulls it off, with a live demo now up at MinesVsHumanity. There might be a game in action if you’re lucky..

Radan Skorić

Implementing Semantic Search in a Rails App— The idea is that you use OpenAI’s API to create embeddings of content, the Neighbor gem to search them, and Anthropic’s Claude API for summarization.

Robert Ross

🌳 Need to Upgrade to Ruby 3.3 on a Budget? Try Bonsai by FastRuby.io— Stuck on Ruby 2.7? Stop postponing your upgrade; ship it with our fixed-cost monthly maintenance service. 🚀

Bonsai By FastRuby.io sponsor

📄 How to Use Stimulus in your Rails Apps with RubyMineDarya Sharkova

📄 Flaky Tests? Check your FactoryBot IDsBrooke Noonan

📺 Turbo Streaming: Broadcasting over WebSockets ExplainedArkency

📄 Rails 7.2 Adds Support for DevcontainersPrasanth Chaduvula

📄 Highlights from Git 2.46Taylor Blau (GitHub)

🛠 Code & Tools

IRuby: A Ruby Kernel for Jupyter Notebooks— Notebook interfaces make it easy to do literate programming where you see results immediately like a REPL but with persistence and control over the formatting of the source code. Common in the Python world, IRuby brings Ruby into the picture too.

Ruby Science Foundation

💡 Nithin Bekal also wrote a tutorial on using IRuby last year.

ERB Lint: A Linter for ERB and HTML Files— Includes a variety of default linting rules for detecting bad syntax, stray newlines, unauthorized script tags, and unsafe interpolation.

Shopify

Your Fastest Path to Production— Build, deploy, and scale your apps with unparalleled ease – from your first user to your billionth.

Render sponsor

ScreenRecorder: Record your Screen from Ruby— It uses FFmpeg behind the scenes but is controllable from Ruby and might be something you’d want to integrate with an automated UI testing run, say.

Lakshya Kapoor

• Mechanize 2.12– Library to automate web interactions. v2.12 introduces experimental support for handling Brotli-compressed responses.

• Passenger 6.0.23– The popular app server improves its Rack 3 support.

• Discourse 3.3– The Rails powered forum system / community platform.

• RBS::Inline 0.6– Write RBS type declarations inline with your code.

• Solid Cache 0.7– Database-backed Active Support cache store.

• Faraday 2.10.1– Flexible, multi-backend HTTP client library.

• Torch.rb 0.17– Libtorch-powered deep learning for Ruby.

• Rage 1.7– HTTP API framework compatible with Rails.

• Stripe Ruby 12.4– Ruby library for the Stripe API.

• ruby-pg 1.5.7– The Ruby Postgres client.

We're now away for a week but will be back on August 15 – see you then!