# Ruby Weekly News 31st July - 6th August 2006

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-31st-july-6th-august-2006/102024>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [August 9, 2006, 11:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-31st-july-6th-august-2006/102024 "2006-08-09T11:43:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/a587f6/32.png) [@weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/weliwarmer)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2006, 11:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-31st-july-6th-august-2006/102024/1 "2006-08-09T11:43:29Z")

</div>

[http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060806.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060806.html)

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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!”

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/a587f6/32.png) [@weliwarmer](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/weliwarmer)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2006, 2:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-weekly-news-31st-july-6th-august-2006/102024/2 "2006-08-09T14:25:35Z")

</div>

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 06:43:04PM +0900, Tim S. wrote:

> # [http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060806.html](http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060806.html) […] Articles and Announcements

Gus asked me to mention the ROUC conference:

```
 * RUBY ROUC conference
 ----------------------

   Gus S Calabrese announced RUBY ROUC, an unofficial conference for
   people who didn't get into RubyConf 2006. It will be held in 

```

Denver,  
Colorado, October 20-22, 2006, and registration is US$75.

```
   There were some discussions about the use of "RUBY" instead of 

```

“Ruby”,  
and the amount of work that’s necessary to have a successful  
conference.
