I wrote this wizard controller library that people seem to really dig called Wicked. It works well to build after signup wizards and to incrementally build objects for the database but there is one thing it didn’t do very well until now: allow you to change the text in your wizard url’s quickly and easily.
If you’re in the Ruby world, you’ve likely heard about mruby, Matz’s latest experimental Ruby implementation. What I bet you didn’t know is that you can run mruby on Heroku right now. As a matter of fact you can run just anything on Heroku, as long as it can compile it into a binary on a Linux box.
When Heroku first launched you could only use one version of Ruby: 1.8.6. As the Ruby implementation matured and improved, so did Heroku. We recently announced the ability to specify your ruby version on Heroku, and we are happy to announce the first preview-build of Ruby available: starting today you can use Ruby 2.0 preview1 on Heroku.
I’m finally wrapping up my UT on Rails series. While people have been getting close to the end of the course, I’ve gotten the question “Now what?” plenty of times. Now that you’ve spent 40+ hours pouring over videos, exercises, and quizzes where do you go from here? To answer this question I made a short video. But first, the last exercise of the course:
Ruby dominates the web: running popular sites like Github, Heroku, and Living Social. But why should web developers get to have all the fun? Wouldn’t it be great if game developers, embedded systems engineers, or anyone else could use the beautiful syntax of Ruby in their C programs? Lucky for us, that’s exactly what mruby plans to do…
Have you ever wanted to convert all the code blocks in a markdown file to embedded gists?
From Android to iPhone, users everywhere have made it abundantly clear that mobile apps are the future, and when it comes to mobile nothing beats a native experience. Native apps mean we need API’s, and API’s need Authentication. That’s why I’m happy to introduce the solution to your mobile Rails backed authentication needs: oPRO. oPRO (pronounced oh-pro) is a Rails engine for adding an OAuth Provider to any Rails app. OAuth 2.0 is how the web authenticates services, if you’ve ever “signed in with Twitter” or “connected with Facebook” you’ve used OAuth. If you’re new to the concept, check out my introduction to OAuth. Otherwise put your programming cap on, cause we’re going to build your first Rails API backed iPhone app.
I wrote some words on Heroku’s past and it’s future.
Software erosion is what happens to your app without your knowledge or consent: it was working at one point, and then doesn’t work anymore. When this happens you have to invest energy diagnosing and resolving the problem. Over a year ago Heroku’s CTO, Adam Wiggins, first wrote about erosion-resistance on Heroku. Part of erosion-resistance is communication, and knowing what to expect moving into the future. This post will clarify what we mean by erosion-resistance, and help you understand what to expect when one of our features is deprecated or is sunset.
