Links are at http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070304.html.
Ruby Weekly News 26th February - 4th March 2007
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to
you
this week by Tim S. (email firstname.lastname at gmail.com),
with contributions from Robert Postill.
Articles and Announcements
* CVS services will be permanently unavailable
----------------------------------------------
Shugo M. announced that the Ruby interpreter's CVS
repositories
will be no longer be available. “The source code repositry has
been
moved to SVN.”
This is unrelated to rubyforge CVS services.
* Ruby-doc.org search for your browser toolbar
----------------------------------------------
James B. recently added a new search feature to ruby-doc.org,
and
it soon became even better:
> Greg [Whiteley] took this a step further and created a browser
> search toolbar auto-discovery file. Users of Firefox 2 and IE7
(and
> possibly others) who visit the site should now see the search
> toolbar icon (usually in the upper right of the browser) become
> highlighted. Clicking the icon will then give you the option of
> adding the ruby-doc.org search to your search toolbar.
* Erlang book is in beta...
---------------------------
"We were lucky to get Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of
Erlang,
to write our latest beta book, Programming Erlang", wrote Dave
Thomas.
> Erlang is [a programming language] designed from the ground up
to
> help programmers create highly concurrently (read thousands or
> processes), highly reliable (read 99.99999% uptime)
applications.
> It’s a real world language-it is used to write telephone
switches,
> banking applications, trading systems…you name it.
There were many excited responses, and also questions about the
possibility of books on other interesting programming languages.
Dave
said he’d love to publish books on IO, Haskell, OCaml, etc.
"It's a question of finding the right author."
* rb-appscript developments (Ruby-AppleScript)
----------------------------------------------
Has noted that "a great introduction to rb-appscript at
O’Reilly’s
MacDevCenter" was just written by the author of “AppleScript: The
Definitive Guide”, Matt N…
In a related thread, Laurent S. announced RubyOSA 0.3.0.
"RubyOSA is a bridge that connects Ruby to the Apple Event
Manager
infrastructure. In big words, it allows you to do in Ruby what
you
could do in AppleScript."
Among other new features, it is now possible to script remote
machines.
User Group News
* Munich.rb meets on Thursday 15th March
----------------------------------------
The Munich.rb group are meeting on Thursday 15th March. Urban
Hafner
will be wearing his Munich.rb T-Shirt, “but I guess a group like
that
will likely stand out anyway ;)”.
* Swiss Ruby U. Group Meeting on 1.3.2007
-------------------------------------------
The SwissRUB met on March 1st, in Zürich.
* South East Michigan Ruby Brigade Meeting
------------------------------------------
The South East Michigan Ruby Brigade had a meeting on March 5th,
with
free pizza, soft drinks, books, and friendly people, announced
Patrick
Hurley.
Threads
Making Ruby faster with Judy
Tomasz W. improved the performance of the Ruby interpreter
by
using the Judy sparse-array library to replace some of Ruby’s
internal
hash tables.
These tables are used for example to do method lookups. Performance
increased by about 5%, and memory usage dropped by 4%.
Mauricio F. said he’d done a similar thing back in 2002. The
biggest problem was that Judy is under the LGPL, which has more
restrictions than Ruby’s license.
win32::changenotify and multiple events
Martin DeMello asked how to get win32::changenotify to capture
multiple
events when e.g. “mkdir -p a/b/c” is executed.
There were not yet any replies.
is there something method in ruby like python’s reduce()
Huang Huangliang wanted to know if Ruby has a standard method that’s
similar to Python’s “reduce”, i.e. to turn an array of values into a
single value, by repeatedly applying a function (block) of two
arguments.
This is sometimes called “accumulate”, “fold” or “inject” in
different
programming languages.
Bira said, yes, it’s Enumerable#inject in Ruby, and gave several good
examples of its use, with the simplest being
Sum some numbers
(5…10).inject {|sum, n| sum + n } #=> 45
The name “inject” came to Ruby via the Smalltalk programming
language.
(Your editor finds it easier to think “accumulate” whenever he sees
“inject”. Your mileage may vary.)
Ruby and COM
“Does anyone know of a stable Ruby-COM bridge which will let one do
things
like importing DLLs, querying for interfaces and calling their
methods?”
queried 11×22.
Robert K. linked to a page of Ruby win32 libraries, and Patrick
Hurley
suggested using the standard Ruby libraries Win32OLE (for calling COM
interfaces) and DL (for calling functions in a DLL directly).
New Releases
Holy Telephony Batman! It’s Batphone 0.1.0
Hans F.: “Does the world need yet another Ruby Asterisk Gateway
Interface library? Does the world need a guy who dresses up like a
bat?”
This one was written to be easy to learn and use.
Ruby In Steel Personal Edition v 1.0
Huw C. announced that Ruby in Steel has got to version
one. It
is “a Ruby editing and debugging environment for Microsoft’s Visual
Studio
2005”.
sapnwrfc next Generation RFC Connector for SAP NetWeaver
Piers H. announced the first “next generation” Ruby RFC
connector for
SAP NetWeaver.
“SAP have undertaken a redevelopment of the RFC connection libraries,
and
as a result the new Ruby Connector is now unicode enabled, and can
handle
complex parameter types.”
Other releases
See the rubyforge news page for more release announcements.
