The Blog

“Game Face” will be our weekly round-up of our internal and external open source work here at Agora Games. Internal open source refers to our public projects that you can find over at our Agora Games GitHub account. External open source work refers to projects that we contribute to in off-hours and may or may not have anything to do with video games because we’re swell folks like that. Pretty simple right? Here goes…

activity_feed

Activity feeds can be complicated to do correctly, which is why we developed the activity_feed gem. The 1.3.0 release adds functionality to update the timestamp for a given activity feed item, which is useful when you want items to “bubble up”. You can also remove items from activity feeds.

Contributor(s): David Czarnecki (GitHub, Twitter)

amico

It was an exciting week for the amico project, which allows you to express relationships (e.g. friendships) backed by Redis. The 2.0.1 release adds support for an all call that can return all the relationships for a given relationship type, such as following or followers. We would also like to highlight acts_as_amico, developed by GitHub user John Metta, which is an ActiveRecord injectable version of the Redis-backed friendship system. He originally submitted this as a pull request to amico.

Contributor(s): David Czarnecki (GitHub, Twitter)

bettertabs

bettertabs is a simple Rails 3.1+ Engine that includes a helper and a jquery plugin to render the needed markup and javascript for a section with tabs in a easy and declarative way, forcing you to keep things simple and ensuring accessibility and usability, no matter if the content is loaded statically or via ajax. The 1.3.6 release this week allows this to be used in Rails 3.2 as well.

Contributor(s): Jeffrey Lee (GitHub)

bnet_scraper

We released a new gem this week, bnet_scraper. This is a Nokogiri-based scraper of Battle.net profiles. Currently this only includes Starcraft 2 data scraping. It has support for scraping profiles, league data, achievements, and match history. Let us know if this gem is useful to you.

Contributor(s): Andrew Nordman (GitHub, Twitter)

leaderboard

One of our most popular gems, leaderboard, has a new release this week with version 2.0.5. leaderboard allows you to create leaderboards (aka high score tables, aka scoreboards) in Redis. This releases addresses the first future idea from the README when the gem was released over a year ago to add a method allowing for bulk insert of data into a leaderboard. Performance of the bulk insert indicates this is preferable to individual inserts if you ever need to insert a large amount of data into a leaderboard.

Contributor(s): David Czarnecki (GitHub, Twitter)

darksky

The darksky gem saw a couple of releases this week. 1.0.2 removed the default to disable SSL peer verification now that the DarkSky API server has a signed certificate. 1.0.3 added the new “interesting” API endpoint to return a list of interesting storms happening right now. It also fixes a bug in the precipitation API endpoint where multiple locations were not correctly passed to the API.

Contributor(s): David Czarnecki (GitHub, Twitter)

Upcoming

We have a number of pull requests that we need to get integrated into various projects. Part of the reason these sat for so long is that we forgot to turn on GitHub notifications for the engineering team for these projects. So, look for releases next week of java-leaderboard, our port of the leaderboard gem to Java, and for errship, a Rails 3.1 engine for rendering error pages inside your layout.

A special thanks to GitHub user, vitaly-krugl, for reporting so many issues on haigha, our simple to use client library for interacting with AMQP brokers.