Wednesday, March 30, 2011

MacRuby 0.10 released by MacRuby

MacRuby announced release of MacRuby 0.10 on 23rd March 30, 2011, just a few weeks after the earlier release Mac Ruby 0.9!

There are several bug fixes, support for MacBook Pro hardware and Xcode 4 integration, which is the new version of IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to develop applications for Mac, IPhone and iPad.

Also, there are bug fixes in macruby_deploy for App Store submissions and several stability fixes.

Here are the release notes for 0.10 http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2011-March/007390.html

MacRuby 0.10 can be downloaded from this link http://www.macruby.org/files/MacRuby%200.10.zip

Note – MacRuby 0.10 works only on Intel 64-bit machines running Snow Leopard (10.6) or later.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

JRuby 1.6 Released: Ruby 1.9.2 Support and More

It's a newsflash! JRuby 1.6.0 has been released today. Congratulations to the JRuby team. 1.6 is a significant and much awaited release and comes after a 9 month push of over 2500 commits.

Hit up the official release post for the full run-through but here are some of the highlights of the release:
  • Windows has been added to the JRuby team's continuous integration system meaning that Windows support is only going to get better
  • Ruby 1.9.2 language and API support (with the exception of Encoding::Converter and ripper)
  • Built in profiler
  • General performance improvements
  • Experimental support for C extensions (with provisos)
  • RSpec is no longer included (worth mentioning in case it catches you out..)
You can download binary and source releases direct from JRuby.org if you want to get up to date or update RVM with rvm get head and rvm reload before running rvm install jruby-1.6.0 :-)
Fingers crossed for some great JRuby tutorials and guides coming along in the next couple of months.

Source: http://www.rubyinside.com

Friday, March 18, 2011

Live from South by Southwest 2011

If you’ve ever heard Matt Mullenweg talk about the early days of WordPress, the South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive festival that takes place each spring in Austin, TX usually crops up in the story. South by Southwest is in full swing right now, and WordPress has been all over the place.

On Friday the 11th, Matt was interviewed by John Battelle of Federated Media in front of a packed ballroom, talking about the future of WordPress. That night, the annual SxSW WordPress BBQ party played host to hundreds of WordPress users, developers, and businesspeople, and attendees got an extra treat this year in the form of a t-shirt made especially to commemorate WordPress and its Texas roots.

On Saturday the 12th, a second party co-hosted by the Austin WordPress Meetup Group and GeekAustin (and co-sponsored by the WordPress Foundation and WPEngine) brought together a similar crowd but with the addition of local WordPress community members who were not registered for the SxSW conference.

Starting today, the South by Southwest trade show opens, and this year for the first time it will feature an official WordPress Genius Bar. Staffed by professional WordPress support staff, developers, advanced users, theme designers, and even some of the core contributors and project leaders, the booth will be open from 11am-6pm each day to answer questions and help people with any WordPress problems they might have. If you are at South by Southwest this year, consider stopping by to say hello and pick up a WordPress button or sticker. We’ll also have a limited supply of the special WordPress/Texas shirts that we’ll be giving away at the booth, so if you’re at SxSW between now and Thursday, stop by.  Hope to see you there!

For Free consultation on regarding Wordpress Expert, Wordpress Programmer, Wordpress Development, Wordpress Customization log on to http://www.dckap.com
Source: http://wordpress.org

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Ruby on Rails - The fast track web application development framework

Ruby on Rails, developed by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2003, is an Open-Source web framework built using Ruby.
The main goal was to enable developers to rapidly develop web applications backed by SQL databases.
Nearly 8 years later, Ruby on Rails has built itself a niche in the IT development world.

Here are some of the advantages for web application using Ruby on Rails Development:

* The framework is entirely built using Ruby, an object oriented language which is also very intuitive and easy to code.
* Ruby on Rails uses the Model View Controller (MVC) software architecture. The main tenet being, separating business logic from user interface (input and presentation).
* Developers spend much less time writing code for the basic functionalities and can concentrate on coding for the specific requirements of client or customer. The same project, that would take weeks, even months to develop using other languages, takes only a few days in Ruby on Rails.
* Ruby on Rails (RoR) follows a Don't Repeat yourself(DRY) rule, wherein, code for a particular functionality is written only once and not repeated at different places. This makes management of code, Debugging and maintaining future versions much easier.
* RoR generates the scaffolding for the Developer that automatically creates a CRUD application (Create new records, Read records, Update records and Delete records).
* The Convention over Configuration principle that is followed in Rails is that RoR makes assumptions about what developer would need by default and creates it; for example, if there is a class called ‘product' in the model, then a table called ‘product' is created by default. Thus the developers do not have to specify every small detail through configuration files. This is a very big time saver and avoids bugs that could be introduced. Of course RoR programming gives the flexibility to modify default behavior in case developer needs to customize.
* Lastly, Ruby on Rails follows the principle of REST (Representational State Transfer) which means every unique URL is a representation of an object, and the contents can be accessed by simple HTTP commands. This provides one of the fastest and standardized ways to develop Web applications.

There are now several web applications built using Ruby on Rails. Here are a few examples -

* Twitter -- The very popular site to pen your thoughts in short sentences used by both individuals and enterprises to be in touch with the world.
* Yellow Pages --a service that helps you search online for contact information of businesses.
* Scribd -- A site where you can read, print, also upload books and documents online.
* Shopify -- An Ecommerce site that helps you create your own online store.

 
Article Source: http://www.ArticleBlast.com

Monday, March 14, 2011

What Is "Eloquent Ruby"?

Eloquent Ruby is a book published by Addison Wesley and written by Russ Olsen (who also wrote Design Patterns in Ruby a few years ago). It clocks in at around 400 pages and has 31 chapters clocking in at around a punchy 10 pages each. Each chapter is titled as a guideline you should follow to write "eloquent" Ruby - things like Create Classes That Understand Equality and Write Code That Looks Like Ruby - and typically the claim is explained, some code examples shown and discussed, some real world examples pointed to, and that's it.

As with Design Patterns in Ruby, Russ adopts a chatty, familiar tone. Reading this book is like reading a book specifically written for you by a friend. He doesn't shoot off on many unnecessary tangents and he keeps the stories short and sweet but this book certainly couldn't be called dry.

The book is also notably short of egregious errors or omissions. Even when I don't read something with a fine-toothed comb on standby, I can usually pick out a laundry list of factual and grammatical errors or omissions (as both Obie Fernandez and my wife will attest) but Eloquent Ruby gave me little to chew on. I can only bring to mind a few spacing and formatting issues and only one true "error": a > instead of a < in a class definition on a single example.

Russ tries to remain neutral with his choice of Ruby implementations but the book seems to focus primarily on Ruby 1.9 (Ruby 1.9.1 specifically but that's just due to when he wrote it) while providing useful footnotes in the cases where there are differences to Ruby 1.8. No matter what Ruby implementation you're using, there's little to confuse you as most of it is very non-implementation and non-version specific.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone except those who, well, could have written a similar book themselves. The short punchy chapters make it a delight to read and gives the option of reading it merely 10 minutes at a time before bed or similar. The short chapters also make it useful as a reference if you forget how to do a certain thing like, say, use method_missing, even though it's not put together as a reference book at all. Lastly, this book is a must read if you're not confident with Ruby idioms and the best way to structure and lay out your code - Russ's approaches reinforce the current "standard" way to write Ruby and this alone is worth the price of admission.

Who Should Buy It?

  • Any Ruby developer who doesn't yet feel like they're at guru level (that's most of us!)
  • Anyone who wants to get a feel for the typically undocumented style, syntax, and structural standards of top Ruby developers.

Who Shouldn't Buy It?

  • Anyone without a sense of humor or who doesn't like a chatty, familiar type of writing.
  • Matz, Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Russ Olsen himself, and a few others.
  • Anyone who's resistant to change and wants to keep coding Ruby "their way."

Thursday, March 10, 2011

WordPress – A Wizard in the world of Blogging and Content Management

WordPress is a very popular blogging and content management system (CMS) tool. It is possibly one of the most well known and respected tool with over 4 million* websites using WordPress!

WordPress is an open source project which started in the year 2003, as a blogging tool.

Users are given an intuitive online interface to type, tag with keywords and upload their blogs or articles. The core idea is to help the user by taking over all the effort needed to present the information online, allowing him/her to concentrate on the content of his blog. Users can customize the theme or in other words, the web layout, background colors, font etc to better suit his content or give a more classy and unique look for his blog.

Once the blog is published on a website, there are other features provided by wordpress developer: Typically, when people read articles or blogs, they like to leave their comments. The interface to leave comments also allows authors to manage the comments posted.

Sometimes, authors would like to link to or comment on other blogs that are related to the same topic; these are done by what are called pingbacks and trackbacks. This way, the readers are made aware of the author’s comments on other blogs in one single page. The other feature that is very useful is Permalink or Pretty url, where users can specify a human readable and intuitive weblink name instead of machine generated links with numbers and special characters.

As WordPress became one of the default choices for blogging globally, subsequent version releases also came to be used as a CMS tool. The administrative panel provided could be used to customize the web layout around the content. The most important feature being a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor giving the user an idea of how the webpage would actually look in browser window.

The user can select if the home page will be static or a live one , for eg. with posts or testimonials updated as they are uploaded to a particular section of the website.

Individual customized Page Templates can also be applied to different pages of the website. Thus, user could choose some pages to not have the same header and footer as the rest. The user also has options to include widgets as sidebars that are dynamic and change as the page changes. By turning off some features that are blog specific, and customizing other features, users can easily build a truly dynamic website with wordpress experts!

Source: http://hubpages.com/hub/WordPress-A-Wizard-in-the-world-of-Blogging-and-Website-designing

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

WordPress Plugin: Disable WordPress Core Update

Description

Completely disables the core update checking system in WordPress 2.3 and higher. It prevents WordPress from checking for updates, and prevents any notifications from being displayed in the admin area. Ideal for administrators of multiple WordPress installations.

Why would I want to disable it?

Most people should not disable this feature. It’s a fantastic feature of WordPress and I’m fully in support of it. However, administrators who maintain multiple installations of WordPress on behalf of other people (eg. clients, friends) may not want update notifications to be shown to the users of these installations. This plugin is for them.

Installation

This plugin is only for WordPress 2.3 and later. Earlier versions of WordPress did not have the core update notification system, therefore do not need this plugin.
Download the plugin using the link at the bottom of this page, unzip it and drop the folder straight into your wp-content/plugins directory. Activate it from WordPress’ Plugin panel.

Please note!

It’s very important that you keep your WordPress installation(s) up to date. If you don’t, your blog or website could be susceptible to security vulnerabilities. If you use this plugin, you must make sure you keep up to date with new WordPress releases and update your WordPress installation(s) as new versions are released.

Download

ZIP file from downloads.wordpress.org
You can also visit the plugin page on wordpress.org.
Any comments, questions, queries, suggestions, complaints, etc, please leave a comment below!

For Free consultation on regarding Wordpress Expert, Wordpress Programmer, Wordpress Development, Wordpress Customization log on to http://www.dckap.com
Source: http://lud.icro.us/

Thursday, March 3, 2011

18th Birthday for Ruby

Yes, I'm sad enough to have had this in my calendar for some time but.. it's Ruby's 18th "birthday" today! Happy Birthday Ruby! While this means she can drink, vote, and otherwise join her slightly older friends Perl (24) and Python (21) in the nightclubs of Europe, I was surprised to learn that coming of age in Japan is at 20 years old.

From Wikipedia's Ruby entry:
The name "Ruby" was decided on during an online chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka on February 24, 1993, before any code had been written for the language. Initially two names were proposed: "Coral" and "Ruby", with the latter being chosen by Matsumoto in a later email to Ishitsuka. Matsumoto has later stated that a factor in choosing the name "Ruby" was because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.
If you're interested in learning more, this interview with Matz back in 2001 will give you more history and background to the creation of Ruby.

While Matz has said that February 24, 1993 is Ruby's "birthday" (back when I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston was topping the charts), the first public release wasn't until December 21, 1995 when Ruby 0.95 was released and the first mailing list established. Ruby 1.0 followed a year later on December 25, 1996, establishing the tradition of Christmas Day Ruby releases.

Here's to 18 more, love.

P.S. Before I get any grief for putting a picture of a young woman on this post — it's happened before *sigh* — this actress played a character called Ruby  in the UK's most popular soap opera and was about 18 at the time. Rock and roll.

Source: http://www.rubyinside.com

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Fun in WordPress 3.1

The long-awaited fourteenth release of WordPress is now available. WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt” is named in honor of the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Version 3.1 is available for download, or you can update from within your dashboard.

This release features a lightning fast redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages, an admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages, a streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers (visit Screen Options in the top right to get old panels back), and a refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

For Free consultation on regarding Wordpress Expert, Wordpress Programmer, Wordpress Development, Wordpress Customization log on to http://www.dckap.com
Source: http://wordpress.org