Ruby Weekly News 5th - 11th December 2005

http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20051211.html

Ruby Weekly News 5th - 11th December 2005

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by
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Articles and Announcements

 * Houston ruby and / or rails user group?
 -----------------------------------------

   Keith L. has left his job to launch a startup, with Rails 

as
the primary technology, and is “looking for like-minded folks in
Houston, Texas. Does anyone know if there is a user group (ruby
and/or
rails) in Houston? If there is not, would anyone be interested in
participating in one?”

 * RWB: call for feedback|developers
 -----------------------------------

   Pat Eyler issued a call for feedback and developers for the Ruby 

Work
Bench (RWB) project, which provides performance and load tests
for
websites.

   He doesn't have enough time to add all the features he wants, and 

also
needs feedback from people for even more ideas.

 * XML Transformations using REXML
 ---------------------------------

   James B.: "Toot toot! That's the sound of my own horn."

   The 30th Anniversary edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - January 2006 
  •  includes an article [Transforming XML & the REXML Pull Parser]
     by (guess who) James B..
    
    • interesting book sales news

     Pay Eyler linked to an article on the O'Reilly Radar entitled
     [Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python].
    
     DHH posted his take on it, noting that at the moment there is 
    

only one
published book on Rails, and one recent Ruby book.

   "Compare that to the wealth of titles available for Python, Perl, 

and
Java. Now imagine what those numbers will look like when the
market
is flooded with new titles in the beginning of the new year."

 * Phoenix.rb : Phoenix Ruby U. Group
 ---------------------------------------

   James B., the refresher of the Phoenix.rb Users' Group, is
   proposing a meeting for the 19th of December. Contact him if 

you’re
interested.

 * CLOSING SHOP! XML:Tools, bindings for libxml and libxslt
 ----------------------------------------------------------

   Trans announced that he would no longer be hosting the libxml and
   libxslt bindings, and requested that a new maintainer step 

forward.
Ross B. said he’d give it a go.

 * Subversion support on RubyForge
 ---------------------------------

   Tom C.: "RubyForge now supports Subversion! Yup, at long 

last,
we’ve got all the pieces in place so that you can use either CVS
or
Subversion for your version control."

   And yes, existing projects using CVS can be converted over.

   Replies included !, !! and even in one case !!! exclamation 

marks. I
think that means people are happy.

 * Ruby Code & Style is looking for articles.
 --------------------------------------------

   James B. said that the online journal Ruby Code & Style is 

looking
for articles for its second edition.

   | We focus on bringing high-quality articles, written by Rubyists 

all
| over the world, showcasing the strengths of Ruby and the
ingenuity
| of its users in solving real-life, non-trivial problems.
|
| We’re looking for technical Ruby articles primarily geared
toward
| experienced Ruby developers. Submissions are peer reviewed by
our
| remarkable advisory board, which includes eminent members of
the
| Ruby community [he’s not kidding - Ed].

 * Ruby: A New Danger
 --------------------

   Hampton posted a 200MB video he created showing that Ruby is 

dangerous
(for Fortran programmers). Recommended, oh yeah.

   Don't let Lispers or Smalltalkers watch it though.

Threads

One-Click Ruby Installer

The one in which Curt H. says the One-Click Ruby Installer won’t
be
updated to Ruby 1.8.3, but will sync with 1.8.4 when it is released
at the
end of December.

Kalah (#58)

Mark Van H. created this week’s Ruby Q. - to create a player
for
the board-game “Kalah”.

:slight_smile: Sharing a Shower Moment :slight_smile:

Surprisingly, not spam. Duck wisdom, the best of which was Ezra
Zygmuntowicz’s “If a duck quacks in the woods… Does
anyone.respond_to?
his calls?”

IL Generator syntax proposal

John L. is rewriting his Ruby <=> CLR (.NET) bridge, with the plan
to
write as much of the code as possible in Ruby, rather than in Managed
C++.
To this end, he had prototyped some syntax for an IL (Intermediate
Language) generation library.

He went on to implement the proposal, see [RbDynamicMethod first
drop].

An example for converting CLR exceptions into Ruby ones:

create_ruby_method(‘convert_clr_exception’) do
try
ldstr ‘error’
newobj ‘Exception.ctor(String)’
throw_ex
catch_ex ‘Exception’
call ‘static ExceptionHelper.RaiseRubyException(Exception)’
end_try
ldc_i4_4
ret
end

Detecting control-c?

William E. Rubin asked how to detect when a user presses ctrl-c (i.e.
sends the INTerrupt signal), and Joe Van D. said that this will do
it:

trap(“INT”) do
puts “got signal INT”
end

Equation graphing software?

Steve L. pondered creating graphs of equations like y=x**2+5 from
Ruby.

Eric L. suggested gnuplot, by having Ruby output gnuplot
commands,
and G.Durga P. noted the rgplot Ruby library for tighter
integration.

For non-Ruby solutions, Dan D. pointed out GNU Octave (a free
software clone of Matlab), which uses GNU Graph for graphics. You can
also
use Graph separately. (Kevin B. is currently writing a Ruby
binding for
it.)

rflickr

Nate A. asked if anyone else was using the “rflickr” library to
access
the Flickr API, as he was having some problems with
flickr.auth.getToken.

“it would also be nice to get anyone who is working on rflickr to
form
some sort of breakout group, so we could pass information around a
bit
faster.”

There were no replies after 6 days.

Oniguruma – when?

Hal F. enquired as to when the new regular expression engine
Oniguruma
would be merged into Ruby. It provides features beyond the current
engine,
such as look-behind, named and non-captured groups and support for
many
character encodings.

Phil T. said you can configure Ruby 1.8.3 at compile time to use
it,
while James Edward G. II said that the word was that it wouldn’t be
default until Ruby 2.0, for fear of breaking compatibility.

Calling ASP C# web service from Ruby?

mmm was getting encoding errors when trying to call a SOAP web
service
running under ASP.NET, from Ruby.

Tsume said that

soap_client.default_encodingstyle =
SOAP::EncodingStyle::ASPDotNetHandler::Namespace

would fix the issue, caused by non-standardness in Microsoft’s SOAP
implementation.

The problem was also behind the thread Ruby SOAP client communication
with
Microsoft .NET webservice.

Semi-OT: Red Crystal - Ruby is taking off everywhere

Patrick H. remarked that the International Red Cross and Red
Crescent
Movement have adopted the “Red Crystal” as a new emblem. Ruby really
is
everywhere now!

New Releases

lazy.rb 0.2

MenTaLguY released a new version of his lazy evaluation library
lazy.rb.

Object#inspect no longer forces the evaluation of a promise,
Kernel#force
was renamed Kernel#demand, and a new API for lazy streams was added.

FireRuby 0.4.1

Fixes to FireRuby to support 64-bit platforms were added by Peter
Wood,
with help from David Walthour.

FireRuby is a library for accessing the Firebird open-source
relational
database system.

Rails RC5 (0.14.4): Next stop one-oh (really, this time!)

David Heinemeier H. said that Rails RC 5 is out, and this one
really
is the last before the 1.0 release.

“We’ve fixed a ton of major, minor, and aesthetic issues and now have
a
package that we would be very proud to call 1.0.”

|!| So upgrade, dammit! Now. And stand by as we finish setting up the
|!| fireworks planned for next week’s release of the long-awaited 1.0.
It’s
|!| magical times, my friends, and the spellcasting is just getting
started.

CLOSING SHOP! XML:Tools, bindings for libxml and libxslt
Ross B. said he’d give it a go.

UPDATE. Sean Crittenden, the original author of the bindings,
appearently frequents these parts quietly. He’s come back out and will
remain project head of the libxml/libxsl projects on Rubyforge, but Bob
Showalter will take on active management and Ross B. will be
active senior developer. Also, the license looks like it will change to
MIT too (yeah!)

So after long last, Ruby will finally have fresh and well maintained
binding to libxml2!!!

T.

Trans wrote:

CLOSING SHOP! XML:Tools, bindings for libxml and libxslt
Ross B. said he’d give it a go.

UPDATE. Sean Crittenden, the original author of the bindings,
appearently frequents these parts quietly. He’s come back out and will
remain project head of the libxml/libxsl projects on Rubyforge, but Bob
Showalter will take on active management and Ross B. will be
active senior developer. Also, the license looks like it will change to
MIT too (yeah!)

Minor correction: Sean’s last name is Chittenden

http://sean.chittenden.org/

James

http://www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation
Ruby Code & Style - Ruby Code & Style: Writers wanted
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys
http://www.30secondrule.com - Building Better Tools

Minor correction: Sean’s last name is Chittenden

Ah, that would be a typo. Thanks for correcting James.

T.