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Ruby Weekly News 12th - 18th June 2006
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity for the
ruby-talk
mailing list (and its mirror equivalents the ruby-talk google group
and
the Ruby forum) and the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup.
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Tim S…
[ Contribute to the next newsletter ]
Articles and Announcements
* Free eBook: The Little Book of Ruby (ruby-talk)
-------------------------------------------------
Huw C. announced The Little Book Of Ruby, a free PDF
book
for newcomers to Ruby.
(Huw is also the co-creator of "Sapphire In Steel: Ruby
Programming
with Visual Studio 2005", along with Dermot H… This software
adds
Ruby support into Microsoft’s VS2005 IDE, including debugger
support.
It is developed in association with Bitwise Magazine.)
* Article on screen scraping w HTree+REXML, RubyfulSoup,
WWW::Mechanize
(ruby-talk)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter S. was "investigating the possibilities of screen
scraping/web extraction/automated web navigation/wrapper
generation in
Ruby", and helpfully wrote up an article comparing the different
Ruby
libraries in this area.
"I am planning to write more entries on this topic, involving
screen
scraping from Rails, Gecko to Ruby GTK widget embedding, wrapper
generation etc."
James Edward G. II: "This was a very good article. Thank you
for
sharing it with us."
* Ruby / RoR Training Camp, Pune (India) (ruby-talk)
----------------------------------------------------
Dibya P. announced a 5-day training camp for Ruby, and
Rails, in
Pune (India) from 21st - 25th June 2006. The camp is run by
Reevik
Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
* Ruby/OpenSSL samples at RubyKaigi2006 (ruby-talk)
---------------------------------------------------
Hiroshi N. posted slides and sources from his Ruby/OpenSSL
presentation at the Japanese conference RubyKaigi 2006.
User Group News
* Ruby Beach group in Miami/Fort Lauderdale (comp.lang.ruby)
------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Nemzow is looking for people to form a user group in
Miami/Fort
Lauderdale.
* Columbia MD Ruby Codefest (ruby-talk)
---------------------------------------
The AgileMaryland user group are working together on a project
called
FeedMaster (a user configurable Podcast feed reader) in order to
improve their agile, Ruby, and Rails skills.
Jeff Waltzer posted the meeting schedule for July, and invited
all
those in the area who are interested in Ruby and Test Driven
Development (TDD) to drop in.
* ruby/rails users in Ireland - interest in forming a user group?
(comp.lang.ruby)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
aidanf would like to start a user group in Ireland.
Could others who are interested please contact him.
* Alaska.rb - Polar bears, igloos and sled dogs... oh my!
(ruby-talk)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Benjamin G. pondered having an Alaska.rb user group, to meet
in
Anchorage once a month. “It might be a long shot but I thought
i’d put
the possibility of such a group out there if others are
interested.”
* Milwaukee RUG Meeting July 12th at 5:30 - 7:30 pm (ruby-talk)
---------------------------------------------------------------
The Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Ruby U.'s Group have their second
meeting
on July 12th. “The Milwaukee RUG would like to thank SpiderLogic
for
providing space for the meeting.”
Threads
Short But Unique (#83) (ruby-talk)
Ruby Q. is by Ryan W. this week.
“The quiz would be to develop an abbrev-like module that shortens a
set of
strings so that they are all within a specified length, and all
unique.”
Troubles Extending IRB (ruby-talk)
Matthew H. is having problems integrating IRB with a GTK+ widget
-
the
IRB source code doesn’t have enough documentation to get his head
around
how it works.“My ultimate goal is to use the Syntax library to create a custom
syntax
highlighting widget using Gtk::TextView and write a full-fledged Ruby
programmer’s editor and create countless plugins, the first one being
the
IRB GTK console.”Is anyone able to help?
ruby-dev summary 28637 - 28714 (ruby-talk)
Kazuo Saito summarised the Japanese list ruby-dev.
Ruby 1.8.5 will be released in the middle of August.
Mauricio F. comments on this in “ruby 1.8.5 release schedule”,
noting that mid-August is O-bon day in many parts of Japan,
a “Japanese Buddhist holiday to honor the departed spirits of one’s
ancestors” (Wikipedia).Previous Ruby releases have often coincided with Christmas.
RubyGems for inclusion in JRuby (ruby-talk)
Charles O Nutter says the next release of JRuby (0.9.0) will work
with
RubyGems. “It will also be the first release in which we ship a full
complement of Ruby’s own .rb libraries. In short, it’s the first
really
usable release with everything you need included.”Absolute paths in $" (ruby-talk)
Trans wondered if Ruby 1.8.5 will convert paths in $"
($LOADED_FEATURES)
to be absolute instead of relative (like 1.9 does), to avoid some
situations where require can load a file multiple times.Matz said it was too big a change for a stable release.
“Compatibility
goes beyond anyone’s expectation.”Unicode roadmap? (ruby-talk)
Unicode was a popular topic this week, with around 200 posts.
- Unicode roadmap?
- A few good articles on Unicode
- Unicode and sprintf method
- A plan for another unicode string hack
- Ruby/Unicode library
It all started with a user complaining that Ruby does not have
“proper Unicode support”. Matz asked him to define what he meant by
proper
support. “Note that 1.8 handles Unicode (UTF-8) if your string
operations
are based on Regexp” (set $KCODE = ‘u’ at the top of your code, or
set the
KCODE environment variable).Ruby 1.9 will have improved behaviour for string encodings, including
Unicode ones.Which missing features are causing the most pain? “I don’t think it
is a
method to get number of characters in a string. It can’t be THAT
crucial”,
pondered Matz, adding that he is a non-English writer and doesn’t
have any
problems with Ruby’s current support.Peter E. said that validates_length_of in ActiveRecord (and
therefore
Rails) doesn’t work with UTF-8 strings since it uses String#length. A
couple of people mentioned case-insensitive regular expressions not
working.Julian `Julik’ Tarkhanov later noted (in response to a different
message)
“Trust me, when multibyte/Unicode handling is optional, 80% of
libraries
do it wrong.”Dmitry S. listed a combination of libraries that can be used to
solve
most Unicode problems, e.g. jcode, which adds methods like
String#jlength
that are encoding-aware; and unicode_hack for ActiveRecord which
provides
a String#chars accessor that’s codepoint-aware and puts your database
connections in UTF-8 mode.The thread started talking about UTF-8 vs UTF-16 vs …, and whether
Ruby
should use one of them for its internal string representation (for
efficiency of splicing etc. in Unicode), and how such a decision
would
affect users of non-Unicode encodings.Tim B. (who among other things “co-edited the XML spec and helped
work
out its character-encoding issues”) said:the practical experience is that the code required to unpack a
UTF-8
stream into a sequence of integer codepoints (and reverse the
process)
is easy and very efficient; to the point that for “slicing and
poking”,
UTF-8 vs UTF-16 vs UTF-32 is pretty well a wash.He went on to give great advice on all manner of questions on how
Ruby
should approach Unicode.See also “Closing in on Unicode with Jcode” from a year ago on
RedHanded.Ruby and Windows Vista (ruby-talk)
Richard L. wondered if anyone had tried running Ruby on Windows
Vista
Beta 2. “Any gotchas?”James Schementi says it’s working fine, with the exception of some
Win32API code, and Barry B. ran Rails under it a few weeks ago
(which
didn’t work for him in Beta 1).Whither Ruby DBI? (comp.lang.ruby)
Someone noticed that Ruby/DBI (database abstraction layer) is only
version
0.10, and wondered why ActiveRecord doesn’t use it. It is still
actively
developed?Dave B. said that it is still active.
Mac OS X automation with Ruby (comp.lang.ruby)
What options are there for automating Mac OS X applications with
Ruby,
asked Tony.Une bévue pointed out RubyAEOSA for using AppleEvent and OSA Scripting
Component.ruby-forum.com (ruby-talk)
Last week’s thread on this topic (too many low-quality posts from
ruby-forum.com) had some outcomes: Andreas S. disabled posts for
unregistered users, added a paragraph with some posting rules, and
links
to the Ruby FAQ and documentation.“I hope this will to improve the quality of postings from
ruby-forum.com.
If you have any better suggestions, please tell me.”Later in the thread, a ruby-forum user posted “Why does Ruby insist
on
using a Webboard instead of a regular newsgroup forum?” … “Lets
just
switch it to a public newsgroup forum and let Ruby flourish. There is
no
need to keep it bottled up like this.”This was a good illustration of the misunderstanding many ruby-forum
users
have about it - they don’t realise it’s a mirror of the ruby-talk
mailing
list. (And the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, when the newsgroup gateway
is up,
which it isn’t at the moment.)
New Releases
Ruby Reports 0.4.9 (ruby-talk)
Gregory B. released the “Sneakin’ Into RoR” edition of Ruby
Reports. It
now has basic Rails integration, with acts_as_reportable in your
ActiveRecord models.
Get your mojo back with Mojo Helpdesk (comp.lang.ruby)
Supercobra Thatbytes introduced Mojo Helpdesk, “a simple ticket
tracking
system for small businesses”. It is written with Rails.
MongrelDay Documentation – Memoirs Of A Web Server (ruby-talk)
Zed S. wished everyone a happy RailsDay, and announced he’d spent
it
writing “tons” of “documentation for Mongrel” (Mongrel is a web
server for
Ruby applications).
Also, “MONGREL IS #2!”: RubyGems was the only rubyforge project to
have
more downloads than Mongrel this week.
BTW, if anyone wonders why I support win32, just ask yourself why
the
Ruby O.-Click installer is consistently in the top three projects
on
RubyForge. Yeah, windows doesn’t matter at all.
NokiaFS (ruby-talk)
Werner Bohl uploaded the first, alpha, version of NokiaFS.
“This application is based on fusefs ruby lib and gammu.
Mounts as user space fs your Nokia phone.”
ZenObfuscate - for when you really really have to ship a (ruby-talk)
Ryan D. announced ZenObfuscate, a commercial tool for effective
obfuscation of Ruby source code.
“ZenObfuscate is a translator for a fairly large subset of ruby that
converts your pure ruby code into a dynamically loadable binary”.
rcov 0.6.0: “differential code coverage”, full (faster)
cross-references,
vim integration (ruby-talk)
The Ruby code-coverage tool `rcov’ now has a “differential code
coverage”
mode that shows you when you’ve added new code that isn’t covered by
tests. Cross-referenced reports have also been improved - you can
click on
a method in the HTML report to see who called it.
Rcov is by Mauricio F., and he thanks Alex W., Coda Hale
and Tim
Shadel for their bug reports.
Announcing MarkaBoo - Creative Commons licensed Rails app for Social
Bookmarking (comp.lang.ruby)
Christian Romney: “After much lobbying, I managed to convince the
company
I work for to release the source of one of our for-profit web
propertied
under a Creative Commons license.”
MarkaBoo is a social bookmarking tool, featuring a WYSIWYG editor,
the
ability to create bookmarks by email and from mobile phones, import
from
other sites like del.icio.us, and more.
Geocoding Goodness (ruby-talk)
Eric H. wrote Ruby bindings for the Yahoo, Google and geocoder.us
geocoding services. “And as a bonus, you get a Yahoo! search gem to
search
either the web or for locations”.
There was an enthusiastic response, and it looks like several people
will
be creating Ruby programs using geocoding soon.