Nikos D.

Rails 2.2 RC1 has just been released. Have you been waiting for this for some time now, while reading all these posts about new features introduced in this version (like I18n, thread-safety, Ruby 1.9 compatibility etc..)? Read the official announcement, see the comprehensive release notes, grab the code[1] and start hacking with Ruby 1.9!

And maybe you'd want to put the async MySQL driver into the mix bowl - just for super fun times ;)

[1]: by running gem install rails -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org -v 2.2.0

MySQL gets some love and the result is finally a phpMyAdmin replacement written in Ruby On Rails. It's name is rbDB and it's one of the apps that got built in 48 hours during this year's Rails Rumble. The project is currently in something like private alpha but hopefully the source code will be released soon. Take a look at the official announcement and the screencast of rbDB and give it a try on the Rails Rumble deployment.

Now, show us the source code... ;)

Here are some books I'm currently reading:

• Visual Design for the Modern Web, New Riders Press, Nov 2007
  
  

• Website Optimization - Speed, Search Engines & Conversion Rate Secrets, O'Reilly,Jul 2008
  
  

• Human Computer Interaction: Research In Web Design and Evaluation, IGI Global, Aug 2006
  
  

• Design Patterns in Ruby, Addison Wesley, Dec 2007
  
  

I wanted to plot some simple bar charts recently and I fell on Gruff once again. Since the examples there didn't have any info about bar charts it took me some time (ok - five with ten minutes :D) to find out that you can use them just like line charts but here are some examples anyway:

A very simple bar chart:



Ok, let's see something more advanced now:



And now a bar chart with most of the options changed:



For even more options you can check Gruff::Base documentation or the whole Gruff API.

Have fun :)