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Ruby Weekly News 31st July - 6th August 2006
Ruby Weekly News summarises some of the week’s activity on the
ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to
you
by Tim S…
Articles and Announcements
* RuportDay2006: A day of fun, prizes, and reporting software!
--------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory B. announced a 24-hour contest for "finding bugs,
squashing
bugs, proposing API changes / feature additions, writing docs,
etc."
for the Ruport reporting library. It will be held on the 13th of
August, and has prizes: US$100 cash for first place, $80 for
second,
and $70 for third (sponsorship thanks to BTree Technology).
Gregory is working on Ruport as part of the Google Summer of
Code.
* More info on RubyConf 2006 registration
-----------------------------------------
Registration for RubyConf 2006 opened on August 2nd, and sold
out.
The conference is in Denver, Colorado, on October 20-22nd, and is
run
by Ruby Central. Inc.
* New R. Culture T-Shirts!
----------------------------
Matt T. designed a bunch of shirts expressing Ruby culture,
with
Ruby code, quotes (especially from _why), Japanese animals etc.
In "Speaking of T-shirts...", Hal F. posted some of his own
designs, with a "Ruby geek" symbol based on ESR's idea of using
the
floater from Conway’s Game of Life.
You can buy Mark's shirts through Spreadshirt, and Hal's through
cafepress. There is also James B.'s RubyStuff.
* ICFP and OOPSLA in Portland, Oregon
-------------------------------------
"For those of you who didn't get in to RubyConf or who didn't
attend
OSCON/FOSCON, there are a couple more opportunities to visit my
home
town in the context of programming languages."
There's the International Conference on Functional Programming on
September 18-20, and OOPSLA on October 22-26 (Object-Oriented
Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications - an ACM
SIGPLAN
International Conference).
User Group News
* Ruby/Rails User Groups in Southern California
-----------------------------------------------
The Orange County Ruby U. Group have a formal meeting every
fourth
Thursday, reported Scott H… Every other Thursday they meet
informally at a place having free WiFi.
* SanDiego.rb Meeting Tomorrow, August 3rd
------------------------------------------
San Diego Rubyists had a meeting on August 3rd, said Kevin C..
"Chris A. will be talking about experiences developing and
deploying
out.landi.sh with Ruby on Rails. Jordan Fowler will be giving us
a run
down on access control and acts_as_authenticated."
Quote of the Week
* Bug or Feature?
-----------------
Tammo F.: "I would expect that method calls and proc calls do
not
differ in such a way. Is this a bug or a feature?"
Matz: "It's a feature, but we are trying to fix it in the next
major
release (1.9 or 2.0)."
Link of the Week
* Summer of Rails
-----------------
Patrick Crowley's come up with a great way of motivating himself
and
others to learn Rails and create useful applications.
Summer of Rails has been running for about a month, and finishes
on
September 23rd. It already has links to 15 Rails sites that have
been
created as a result of the project, and it has a fantastic logo
Threads
Session support for SOAP client
D.Kay wondered how to call a web service that has a `Login’ method
returning a user_id that must then be passed to subsequent methods?
He’d got it to work with XMLRPC::Client, but how do you store session
cookies with SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory?
Hiroshi N. explained that if you install http-access2 you can
then
write
driver.options[“protocol.http.cookie_store_file”] = “cookie.file”
humanized Xml tree navigation
chiaro scuro asked if anyone knows a library that lets you access an
XML
tree like “normal objects”, e.g. people.person[2].name.
Hiroshi N. posted some code using XSD::Mapping from the
standard
library:
require ‘xsd/mapping’
people = XSD::Mapping.xml2obj(File.read(“people.xml”))
people.person[2].name # => “name3”
You can also write e.g. people[‘foo-bar’] to deal with tags that have
hyphens etc. obj2xml can convert an object tree into XML.
Ruby Cookbook
There were around 40 posts talking about the Ruby Cookbook (by Lucas
Carlson and Leonard Richardson, published by O’Reilly).
Much of the discussion was around the lack of an electronic version
of the
book (e.g. PDF), but James Edward G. II said:
Just glancing through it though I’m pretty jazzed up about reading
it.
There is a metric ton of content in there and it looks to cover
just
about everything to some degree. I could see it being a very
helpful
tool for most people, since your area of interest likely receives
at
least some coverage.
extending ruby with ocaml
Ara.T.Howard highlighted ProjectIdeas/RubyOCaml from the SciRuby
wiki, a
simple proof-of-concept of calling Objective Caml code from Ruby
(using C
as an intermediate language).
“[T]his has seen the list before but, seeing all the interest in
ocaml
recently i thought i’d post it again”.
Ilmari H. recalled some discussion around adding OCaml support
to
RubyInline, and asked “did anything come out of that?”
New Releases
There were many more releases this week than those listed below.
Check out the RubyForge main page for more release announcements.
Motiro 0.4.2
Thiago A. released a new version of his software tracking system
(featuring a “Subversion front end, an event notification system and
a
smallish wiki-like language for page edition with support for
translation”). It’s similar to Trac.
“It has borrowed its name from an ancient tupy word meaning a work
gathering. Motiro is a time when people get together to collaborate
on a
common goal such as harvesting food or building houses.”
Nitro/Og 0.31.0
Gabriele Renzi announced Nitro 0.31. “The release is mostly due to
the
great work of Bryan Soto at integrating patches from the community
and to
the nicety of darcs :)”
Nitro is a web application framework, and Og is an object
persistence/mapping library.
There were discussions about the differences between Rails and Nitro.
(They’ve existed for roughly the same amount of time.)
JRuby Extras - making Ruby apps spectacular in the Java world
Charles O Nutter happily announced the “JRuby Extras” project.
“This project is intended to be a community-maintained nursery of
plugins
and extensions to extend JRuby’s capabilities and to provide
Java-based
versions of many popular C extensions.”
Projects so far include a `port’ of Mongrel, an ActiveRecord JDBC
adapter
and a set of Java-aware Rake tasks.
“Anyone interested in porting an extension to Java or making their
favorite Ruby app run under JRuby should join the project!”