Behavior-driven development (BDD) is similar to test-driven development (TDD), but the tests for BDD are written in an easier-to-understand language so that developers and clients alike can clearly understand what is being tested. This article presents two tools for BDD with ruby: RSpec and Cucumber.

This article proposes a Rails refactoring catalog.

Rhomobile has revolutionized the process of developing mobile applications. It has enabled developers to become much faster and more efficient, allowing quicker application development. It enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using HTML and Ruby instead of proprietary languages such as Objective-C. Currently, the Rhodes framework supports development for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Google Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry operating systems.

This article explains how to use the JRuby programming language with Oracle Database 11g Release 2. JRuby allows the Java platform and extensive libraries to be augmented with an easy to use and powerful scripting language.

RSpec is a Behavior-Driven Development tool for Ruby programmers. BDD is an approach to software development that combines Test-Driven Development, Domain Driven Design and Acceptance Test-Driven Planning. RSpec helps you do the TDD part of that equation, focusing on the documentation and design aspects of TDD.

Web applications have evolved significantly and are taking another leap forward with the advent of mobile web applications. Now more than ever, web applications are expected to provide a native experience—one that is on par with native mobile applications. Though mobile web browsers provide the capabilities to make this possible, web development is still primitive when compared to native application development. SproutCore is a web application framework that aims to make developing for the web similar to developing a native application for a particular device. Explore SproutCore and examine it as a framework for building mobile web applications.

Ruby is the current state-of-the-art language for constructing internal domain-specific languages (DSLs). One of the best Ruby implementations is the one that runs on the JVM: JRuby. In this installment of Evolutionary architecture and emergent design, you'll learn how to leverage Ruby's expressiveness yet keep the benefits of your existing (and future) Java™ code. You'll see how to construct internal DSLs in Ruby as a way of capturing domain idiomatic patterns.

Learn a fast and easy way to implement and consume web services with Ruby on Rails' Active Resource. In a RESTful way, Rails helps you simplify the interoperability between your web applications. Examples walk you through the basic operations of Active Resource. You'll also explore the differences between REST and SOAP.

Ruby on Rails, a popular Web development framework based on the Ruby programming language, makes it easy to access your database, but it does not always do so efficiently. Learn more about common performance problems with Rails and discover how you can fix them.

With configuration, installation, and the use of Hadoop in single- and multi-node architectures under your belt, you can now turn to the task of developing applications within the Hadoop infrastructure. This article explores the Hadoop APIs and data flow and demonstrates their use with a simple mapper and reducer application.