Panasonic Youth

New Releases: LogBuddy 0.5 and CapGun 0.2.4

Hey now, it has been quiet here for too long, so what better way to bring some life back then open source updates?

First, LogBuddy, the little developer tool that could, has been updated to 0.5. What is LogBuddy? LogBuddy is a very small tool that logs the name of the thing your are logging, plus its value. Stop typing puts my_var => #{my_var} while doing ad-hoc debugging. For example, assuming you have a local, an ivar, and a class var called ‘a’:

d { a }       => a = "foo"
d { @a }      => @a = "my var"
d { @@bar }   => @@bar = "class var!"

There are a few significant changes in this release.

  • You no longer have to call LogBuddy.init in order to have the d method available everywhere - now it just happens upon require unless you specifically set SAFE_LOG_BUDDY in your environment. This makes LogBuddy easier to require and use for small tasks.

  • No more logger method mixed in everywhere - that was a bad idea and just asking for namespace bugs.

  • LogBuddy will no longer raise if the logged line of code is removed before the output is generated. This probably only happened if you were coding quickly and using a tool like autotest or watchr to run tests on change.

CapGun adds deployment notifications to Capistrano, so you can email blast interested parties on deployments. Version 0.2.4 fixes a bug where notifications would fail on the very first deploy due to a missing REVISION directory. This version also got fixes for Rails 3 using the new ActiveSupport, thanks to Jared Pace for those.