Blog article

This is the second issue of our weekly compilation of interesting news and articles about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript and web development related stuff.

Hope you enjoy it!

Ruby 2.3.0-preview2 Released
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/12/11/ruby-2-3-0-preview2-released/
The most remarkable changes since preview1 are those to support a pre-compilation system and a few performance tuning fixes.

IBM’s open source JVM project could also speed Ruby, Python
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3014128/open-source-tools/ibms-open-source-jvm-project-could-also-speed-ruby-python.html
https://github.com/rubyomr-preview/rubyomr-preview
A new project initiated by IBM to create a toolkit for language runtimes is about to go open source, and it could be used to speed up the performance of existing runtimes for many languages, including Ruby.

4 ways to get the most out of your Rails logs
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2015/12/09/4-ways-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-rails-logs

Speeding Up Bulk Imports in Rails
https://blog.codeship.com/speeding-up-bulk-imports-in-rails/
It compares 4 different approaches, from the naive one (slowest) to the one using of activerecord-import gem (faster)

Introduce after_{create,update,delete}_commit callbacks
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/22516

Rails API: Ability to return error responses in json format in development
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/20831

25,000+ Req/s for Rack JSON API with MRuby
http://lucaguidi.com/2015/12/09/25000-requests-per-second-for-rack-json-api-with-mruby.html
Benchmark for a simple Rack JSON API app using the new HTTP web server H2O. The H2O team has recently released a new version with mRuby support.

Choosing an HTTP Status Code — Stop Making It Hard
http://racksburg.com/choosing-an-http-status-code/

An Introduction To PostCSS – Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/introduction-to-postcss/
PostCSS is a tool for transforming styles with JS plugins. These plugins can lint your CSS, support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.

Why I’m Excited About Native CSS Variables
http://philipwalton.com/articles/why-im-excited-about-native-css-variables
A few weeks ago CSS Custom Properties landed in Chrome Canary as an experimental feature.

Getting Started With CSS calc()
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/getting-started-css-calc-techniques

Introducing the CSS Grid Layout spec
http://www.creativebloq.com/css3/introducing-css-grid-layout-spec-111517952
CSS Grid Layout is a specification for creating two-dimensional grids. It will give you the ability to set up a grid for your webpage and place elements precisely on it. The specification is currently in Working Draft status, and there is an excellent implementation behind a flag in Chrome.

How to Schedule Background Tasks in JavaScript
http://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-schedule-background-tasks-in-javascript
requestIdleCallback is a new API designed to schedule non-essential background tasks during those moments the browser is taking a breather. Available in Chrome Canary for now.

Chrome Dev Summit 2015 Notes
https://danoc.me/blog/chrome-dev-summit-2015-notes/
A quick overview of Chrome Dev Summit sessions.

MongoDB 3.2 Release Notes
https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/release-notes/3.2
This MongoDB release includes WiredTiger as the default storage engine, replication election enhancements, config servers as replica sets, readConcern, and document validations.

Scaling to 100M: MySQL is a Better NoSQL
http://engineering.wix.com/2015/12/10/scaling-to-100m-mysql-is-a-better-nosql