Imagine you've got a blogging app and it's currently generating URL paths like posts/10 for individual posts. You decide the path should contain the post title (in some form) to make your URLs friendlier when someone reads them. I know I certainly prefer to read http://caiustheory.com/abusing-ruby-19-and-json-for-fun vs http://caiustheory.com/?id=70. (That's a fun blog post if you're into (ab)using ruby occasionally!)

Ever since I found out about the new hash syntax you can use in ruby 1.9, and how similar that syntax is to JSON, I've been waiting for someone to realise you can just abuse eval() for parsing (some) JSON now.

See the Update at the end before you get excited :(

If you've not heard of it, MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks. Basically means you write in Ruby using Objective-C frameworks, and vice versa. It's pretty damn cool to be honest!

Ran into a problem today where I have a class with a few attributes on it, but I only want a certain three of those attributes to appear in the YAML dump of a class instance.