We had a conversation about the fact that the 'TDD is about testing vs TDD is about design" debate that keeps popping up, especially now in the Ruby community.

In a nutshell, Bowline lets you build cross platform desktop applications with Ruby, HTML and JavaScript. The idea is to make building desktop apps as simple (and fun) as building Rails websites.

For all of my professed admiration of Ruby on rails, I personally don't think that easier and more productive CRUD application writing will shake things up. I personally care very much about writing applications in a tenth of the time, but using Rails is like listening to Jaco Pastorius. The real learning experience comes when you try to duplicate the feat.

A/Bingo is a Ruby on Rails A/B testing framework written as a plugin.

Rio is a facade for most of the standard ruby classes that deal with I/O; providing a simple, intuitive, succinct interface to the functionality provided by IO, File, Dir, Pathname, FileUtils, Tempfile, StringIO, OpenURI and others. Rio also provides an application level interface which allows many common I/O idioms to be expressed succinctly.

It's important, however, that his wonderful code live on, and we need your help to do so. We've mirrored what repos we could find and contacted github tech support, who have promised assistance. Whymirror will do what it can to ease the transition but CANNOT be a long-term solution

You want to try out all of the different ruby interpreters and versions including different patchlevels, but you don't want to break what's working for you now. No time to waste?

Celerity is a JRuby wrapper around HtmlUnit – a headless Java browser with JavaScript support. It provides a simple API for programmatic navigation through web applications. Celerity aims at being API compatible with Watir.

Recently I've been made aware of people inside US Government organizations using my Ruby on Rails Security presentation as an excuse to limit Ruby on Rails adoption and projects inside those organizations.

Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out.

Write declarative tests using nested contexts without performance penalties. Contest is less than 100 lines of code and gets the job done.

Pure-Ruby alternative to Cucumber.

Passing the --profile flag to RSpec produces some additional output, namely the running times of the ten slowest examples in your specs.

All methods generated by string_attr_reader are now added to that new module instead of the class. The result is that when overriding those methods you can now call super because they’re are inherited from the new module.

The idea behind scrooge is both surprisingly simple and powerful: instead of forcing the developer to manually specify each attribute column, simply observe and record for some period of time all of the attribute accesses and then reuse this knowledge in the future to automatically optimize your subsequent query requests.

Deadweight is RCov for CSS, kind of. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.

decided to go fixtureless with Shoulda + Factory Girl. All good, except one problem. Slow as fuck tests. So here’s fast_context as a solution for it. fast_context compiles all the ‘should’s within a context into a single test.

Stop writing your own random string generators. Rails does this for you.

WTF GitHub??

DevIL is a fast and lightweight image library that supports the loading and saving of images in almost any graphics format. It also provides some basic image manipulation functionality.

Riot differs primarily in that it does not rerun setup for each test in a context.

Limelight is a rich client GUI framework unlike any other. With a unique angle on GUI development, Limelight harnesses the power to develop a wide range of applications from business tools to games.