rorcasts : rails / ruby podcasts

Railcar tries to make setting up Rails easier before the Japanese bullet train zooms by, CoffeeConsole comes to our Web Inspectors, Konacha gives you serious JavaScript tests within Rails, Schnitzelpress makes blogging easier and faster, Proffer decouples your instance variables from your views and ruby-debug19 gets forked into a 1.9.3-compatible debugger.

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Railcar: an isolated Rails environment


You've probably heard about Yehuda Katz’s Tokaido project based on his Kickstarter campaign to make it simpler for beginners to setup and install a Rails environment for development on OS X. The project has inspired Jeremy McAnally to create Railcar, a MacRuby application which creates an isolated environment for you with Homebrew, rb-env, Ruby, and some default packages. All of this is isolated from the rest of your system. The project isn't near a public release, but if you want to get involved with helping the project Jeremy is looking for assistance with development, or donations to help fund development.

CoffeeConsole


If you've found yourself cursing at having to write vanilla JavaScript in the Web Inspector console after days of bliss in CoffeeScript land, you can relax now. Jonathan Snook has created a nice little Chrome extension that adds a CoffeeScript console to the Inspector, giving you freedom from curlies and verbose syntax.

Getting started with Konacha


Jo Liss dropped us a line to let us know about Konacha, a library he’s been working on with its maintainer John Firebaugh to write JavaScript tests in your Rails app with the Mocha JavaScript test framework and the Chai assertion library. Konacha recently hit version 1.0, and because it’s tied into rails and not framework agnostic, it’s takes full advantage of Rails asset pipeline and engines.

While you should still use something like Capybara & Selenium for integration testing, some of the MVC heavy javascript frameworks coming out these days require more thorough testing, which Konacha will definitely help you with.

Schnitzelpress 0.2.0


Schnitzelpress is a lightweight mobile-friendly blogging engine which comes with Haml, Sass and Markdown baked in and recently hit version 0.2.0. Unlike Octopress, it’s not a static HTML generator and instead uses a MongoDB database and is designed to run very fast on a free Heroku plan. This new version brings the ability to delete posts, a centralized command line tool, a configuration page, a custom asset pipeline and a bunch of other useful improvements.

Protect instance variables with Proffer


If you try to avoid close coupling inside your app and you feel squeamish about Rails sharing all instances variables from your controller actions with your views, a new gem called proffer might be a solution for you.

The goal is the same the decent_exposure gem but the difference lies in the implementation. With decent_exposure the variables need to be exposed at the top of the controller. With proffer you call the proffer method and pass it a key — a symbol for the variable name — and a value — the actual value.

debugger


If you’ve given Ruby 1.9.3 a try since last summer you’re probably aware that ruby-debug19 isn’t compatible with it which has prevented some people from upgrading because their debugging workflow is tied to the gem. Pry, a new debugger which comes with its own ecosystem has already been working fine with 1.9.3 for a long time. It's a great tool and you should be giving it a try. But Pry is not exactly like ruby-debug. So the good news for you conservative debuggers out there is that the ruby-debug19 project was forked by Gabriel Horner and you can now use his new gem simply called debugger which is fully compatible with Ruby 1.9.3.