"Lightrail is a minimalist Rails 3 stack for apps that serve primarily APIs, with a particular focus on JSON APIs. This makes Lightrail an ideal Rails backend for client-heavy HTML5/JS applications, particularly single-page applications written in frameworks like Backbone.js, Ember.js, and Spine.

If Sinatra doesn't give you enough, but Rails is still too much, Lightrail is for you."

Cucumber documentation (covers Sinatra and other non-Rails frameworks)

Rather scarily detailed list of Ruby HTTP clients

"A simple yesod tutorial. Yesod is an Haskell web framework. You shouldn’t need to know Haskell."

I use RSpec in all my projects. It’s really hard to overemphasize how helpful it is and how much easier becomes your life if you have good specs coverage. But its outstanding flexibility enables many ways to make your specs awful: horribly slow, over-bloated, even non-readable sometimes. I do not want to teach you BDD and RSpec here, but instead I will give you some ideas how to improve your specs quality and increase efficiency of your BDD workflow.

"One of the complaints about Ruby on Rails that I hear most often is its complexity, despite all the video tutorials showing how easy it is to build a simple application in 5 minutes. In reality, Rails was a huge paradigm shift for web application development and even with its complexity it's a great platform.

I've spent the better part of the last 6 years writing applications using Ruby on Rails and people often ask me for my perspective on how to bootstrap an application and best practices for using Rails. I also see a lot of people getting lost in the noise of scaffolding and complicated tutorials.

That's why I decided to write an example application using Ruby on Rails 3.1. The application is on Github to make it easy to get to, and takes advantage of source code control features like branches so you can follow along as the application gains functionality."

Tutorial/guide for Ruby testing with Minitest

"derailed_duke ~ now test any website using cucumber as an independent testing utility"

Ruby code for converting to UK Ordnance Survey coordinate systems from WGS84

This article focuses on the workflow of installing RVM, and use it to install Ruby 1.9.2 (MRI), create gemsets and install Rails 3.1 Release Candidate, while considering current best practices.

"Community contributed documentation for the Sinatra Book, a cookbook for the Sinatra Web Framework."

"I decided to try using sinatra for a small project I started the other day. I normally work in rails and host my personal projects on heroku. Since rails 3 came out I have also gotten hooked on bundler. I could not find any single source that documented how to use all of these together nicely. Here is how I got it to work."

Command-line cheatsheets

Blocks, Procs and lambdas (referred to as closures in Computer Science) are one of the most powerful aspects of Ruby, and also one of the most misunderstood. This is probably because Ruby handles closures in a rather unique way. Making things more complicated is that Ruby has four different ways of using closures, each of which is a tad bit different, and sometimes nonsensical. There are quite a few sites with some very good information about how closures work within Ruby. But I have yet to find a good, definitive guide out there. Hopefully, this tutorial becomes just that.

Here at PlataformaTec we like to use Capybara for acceptance tests. Recently we have discovered the custom selectors feature in Capybara and we would like to share with you how that feature helped us to improve our tests.

Ruby, as a dynamic language, is always used for quick processing command-line tool for its simplicity and productivity.

This article talks about three ways to write a command-line tool.

"The excellent people at the Greater London Assembly have released a list of bus stops and bus routes in London. The coordinates of each bus stop are in eastings and northings, and I wanted to convert these to longitude and latitude for my Ruby on Rails application.

Using the proj4rb gem and some projection definitions from spatialreference.org – with some help from Harry Wood’s blog, I came up with the following code"

"Facebooker is a Ruby wrapper over the Facebook REST API. Its goals are:

Idiomatic Ruby
No dependencies outside of the Ruby standard library (This is true with Rails 2.1. Previous Rails versions require the JSON gem)
Concrete classes and methods modeling the Facebook data, so it‘s easy for a Rubyist to understand what‘s available
Well tested"

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book
A thorough introduction to web development with Ruby on Rails
Up-to-date (now Rails 2.3.8, Rails 3 ASAP)
Associated screencast series coming soon

"Learning a new programming language always is fun and there are many great books legally available for free online. Here’s a selection of 30 of them"

"Here is a roadmap specially designed for a beginner to navigate their way to Rails mastery.

I’ve intentionally structured this roadmap so that you can learn one thing at a time. That way, you’ll spend more time creating and less time confused."

"Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the excellent Sinatra Microframework. Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating simple web applications in Ruby. Padrino was created to make it fun and easy to code more advanced web applications while still adhering to the spirit that makes Sinatra great!"

Haml takes your gross, ugly templates and replaces them with veritable Haiku.

Haml is the next step in generating views in your Rails application. Haml is a refreshing take that is meant to free us from the shitty templating languages we have gotten used to.

Haml is based on one primary principle. Markup should be beautiful.

ust last week Ordnance Survey released a tonne of data. This is of course a wonderful thing for everybody, and software making use of this data has only started appearing in the past week. This morning, in fact, we noticed a gem, pat by Stef Lewandowski which uses Pezholio/Stuart Harrison’s very useful UK Postcodes.
We took a look at it, and decided to make a gem that uses a local database (usually a bit faster than using a Web-based API), but which is similarly easy to use.
Three hours later, we present to you posty!
The data it provides from CodePoint Open is:
postcode
quality
latitude
longitude
country
nhs_region
nhs_health_authority
county
district
ward
In all these cases, rather than proving the name of the county/district/ward/etc, it only provides the identifier used in the data set. This is a case where UK Postcodes would be a better option.

The holy grail for a lot of Internet Marketers is automation. This can be obtained through simple iMacros scripts, some PHP scripts on a server, or with a little tool called Watir using the Ruby programming language. All of these combos have their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, but that’s not something I’m going to go over here. I like to use Watir for a lot of botting needs, so that’s what I’m going to show you how to do today.

Getting Started guide for Sinatra with focus on development environment

The Ruby Koans walk you along the path to enlightenment in order to learn Ruby. The goal is to learn the Ruby language, syntax, structure, and some common functions and libraries. We also teach you culture. Testing is not just something we pay lip service to, but something we live. It is essential in your quest to learn and do great things in the language.

Alex's recipe for setting up RoR on Snow Leopard

"I recently had the privilege to supply the challenge for the second ever Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies. I thought it pretty cool that the challenge provoked 40+ "newbies" to submit responses. As one might expect, there was some rough Ruby, but very few butcherings of the language.

In the spirit of the code review, I tried to provide constructive feedback to all participants. Following is a summary of some common suggestions that I had to offer..."

Contains an interesting example of how tests could have prevented some problems...

If you're using the Twitter API and you issue the command to query a timeline, you'll get what looks to be a whole mess of XML. If you look closely, the XML is well-structured and hierarchical. The encompassing array is the statuses element. This houses a list of status elements which describes each individual status update. In the status element are various other elements, such as text and created_at. Nested even more deeply inside the status element is the user element, which describes the user the update belongs to.

The Twitter API (Application Programmming Interface) in Ruby on Rails is about as simple as you can get. Twitter is a RESTful Rails application. API calls that query for information are GET requests, while information that changes, creates or deletes information are POST requests. The commands themselves are the URL your program accesses. Twitter will return status codes in the HTTP response code, and data in the format of your choosing (HTML, XML, RSS, etc).

Ruby object relational mapper

The ruby-nxt library lets you control the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics kit via Bluetooth using the Ruby language.

There are three interfaces:

* High-Level: The NXT class provides multi-threaded, object-oriented interface to the motors, sensors, and most other core NXT functions.
* NEW High-Level: The Commands module (included with NXTComm) provides a command object-based interface very similar to the Blocks in NXT-G. (this may replace the NXT class in the future)
* Low-Level: The NXTComm class provides direct access to the NXT Bluetooth bytecode protocol. There is also the UltrasonicComm class which implements the I2C communications needed to interact with the ultrasonic sensor (via NXTComm).

ruby-nxt requires the ruby-serialport library which you must manually download and install from: rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-serialport

"With the help of super awesome ruby hacker Mike Dalessio, I wrote an XML/HTML parsing library for ruby called Nokogiri. What is so great about Nokogiri? Well, for one it is really easy to parse HTML or XML:"

While MacRuby is a younger, lesser known implementation, it has the potential to become a game changer - at least for Mac developers. Based on Ruby 1.9, MacRuby’s main aim is to provide programmers with the ability to write Mac OS X applications in Ruby, making Ruby a first class Cocoa programming language. In what may sound like an utopistic effort, MacRuby strives to provide the high level abstractions, power and syntax sugar of Ruby, without the characteristic performance hit of its main implementation.

"Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby with minimal effort"

"FeedTools is a simple Ruby library for handling rss, atom, and cdf parsing, generation, and translation as well as caching. It attempts to adhere to Postel’s law—i.e. a liberal parsing and conservative generation policy.

It’s ideal for parsing RSS feeds in Ruby on Rails applications and equally useful in just simple scripts. FeedTools can also create new feeds for you in only a few lines of code."

"This tutorial describes how to write your own Twitter bot by Ruby."

"In this part I will show how to log in to a Jabber server and send a simple message. This is the basis of everything else, and will give you something nice to start with. After all, sending messages is the most common use for Jabber."

"In this article we will build an actual useful Twitter Service that will allow us to track the Blogosphere. In the process we will get hands on programming experience with Ruby, DRb, Twitter and Jabber. This will sharpen our developer skill-set to get ready for the upcoming (Folk)Semantic Web. Also we evaluate the problems seen and opportunities ahead."

"Garrick van Buren has written a clever little script that uses rb-appscript and XMLRPC to send photos from iPhoto to a Wordpress blog. It's surprisingly short and effective."

"...Filtering out meaningful data from such a HTML mess is referred to as web scraping and in this article I’d like to show you how to do it with scRUBYt!, Ruby’s probably most popular web scraping framework."

"Ruby is a dynamic programming language that, over the last few years, has enjoyed enormous popularity, thanks in part to the Rails web framework. Now with MacRuby, you can create Mac OS X applications with Ruby while maintaining the peformance benefits of a fully fledged Cocoa application. This article will show you how to get started with MacRuby and build your first sample application."

Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 1: Serving content for iPhones

Understanding RSpec Stories - a Tutorial

Rails 2.1 is right around the corner and now comes my update for “The First Full Rails 2.1 Tutorial”.

A brief introduction to the why behind TDD and an explanation on how BDD builds on that. A quick walk through of the ruby BDD framework, rspec

Basic intro to using rspec - with an example using restful_authentication

Social networking site-in-a-Rails-shaped can

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to add Rails as a tool to your development toolbox. If you’re proficient with PHP, you already have the essential skills needed to build web applications. This site will present an ongoing discussion of

The main Ruby and Rails forums, all bazillion of them.

An online copy of the first edition of the Pickaxe.

A text version of the original DHH "create a blog in 30 mins" Rails demo.

"Photo galleries can be developed easily with Rails using the attachment_fu plugin. In this blog entry i will give an example of how you could get started with this plugin, based on my own experience with it."

A list of the "top 12" RoR tutorials. From 2005, so getting somewhat outdated, but useful nonetheless.

RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller.

Snippets is a public source code repository. Easily build up your personal collection of code snippets, categorize them with tags / keywords, and share them with the world

Key to decoding US-style METAR reports, with notes on how they differ to ISO standards

command line twits and an api wrapper

I often find myself trying to automate content extraction from a saved HTML file or a remote server. I've tried a number of approaches over the years, but the dynamic duo of Hpricot and Firebug blew me away

Hpricot is a very flexible HTML parser, based on Tanaka Akira's HTree and John Resig's JQuery, but with the scanner recoded in C (using Ragel for scanning.)

Graticule is a geocoding API for looking up address coordinates and performing distance calculations. It supports many popular APIs, including:

* Yahoo
* Google
* Geocoder.ca
* Geocoder.us
* PostcodeAnywhere
* MetaCarta

Test-driven development is A Good Thing. There are many sites out there that will give you abstract discussions on why you should be doing it, so this page won’t dwell too much on that. This is intended to give a basic ‘recipe’ to follow, mostly for

Here’s an introductory tutorial for those of you interested in getting started with RSpec.

This article is for fellow Rubyists looking for more information on test writing and how that fits into Ruby On Rails. If you’re new to test writing or experienced with test writing, but not in Rails, hopefully you’ll gain some practical tips and insi