Run Ruby Script Automator Action

Jason Foreman published an Automator action that allows you to take advantage of Cocoa in Ruby scripts on his blog.

Gem 1.1 released

Bug fixes, speedups. More details on Eric Hodel's blog. Update with
sudo gem update --system

Matz on Ruby

I got to see Matz speak on Ruby at work, and finally found the video of the lecture.

JRuby 1.0 Released

Read more details at http://www.jruby.org/.

Or just download it at http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby and try it for yourself.

RubyCocoa 0.11.0 released

RubyCocoa 0.11.0 is out. Build Cocoa applications with Ruby. Download it from Sourceforge.

Replace AppleScript with Ruby

There's a great article on replacing AppleScript with Ruby at O'Reilly's MacDevcenter here.

Tab completion and syntax hilighting for irb

Frank Spychalski posted how to use wirble to get syntax hiliting and tab completion in irb here.

Ruby on Rails & MySQL on Tiger

First, see the previous blog entry to fix your Ruby install to be able to make proper binary extensions. You're going to need to build a mysql extension for Ruby later.

If you haven't already done so, install XCode (it's on the Tiger DVD), and fink. If you've only just installed fink, make sure you do a

fink selfupdate
fink update-all

Those will take a considerable amount of time if you haven't run them before.

Now you need to install MySQL. You can either do it from the bare tarball, or use a package manager like fink or darwinports. I like fink, so do:

fink install mysql mysql-client

and let fink grind away at all the assorted dependencies mysql needs. This will take a while, MySQL is big.

Now that MySQL is installed, we can install rails -

sudo gem install rails

Rails doesn't ship with an adapter for MySQL. We install it like so (this should be one line)

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/sw/lib/mysql --with-mysql-include=/sw/include

so that it can find the mysql libraries fink installed earlier. Note that the -- --with-mysql-include is supposed to be there, that isn't a typo.

You can now go find one of the Rails tutorials like the one Vincent Foley has at http://darkhost.mine.nu:81/~vince/rails/tutorial.html and get started with Rails.

Fix Ruby problem on 10.4

I've wanted to experiment with Ruby on Rails (the same technology behind Backpack) for a while now, but ran into a problem when I tried to install it on my 10.4 machine. Rails installs with gem, no problem, but I couldn't get gem to build the external libraries Ruby needs to interact with MySQL.

Fortunately, the kind folks at technoblog made a script that does all the fixes you need to get your Tiger Ruby to properly make binary libraries.