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Ruby Weekly News 7th - 13th August 2006
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
by Tim S…
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Articles and Announcements
* blade will be stopped
-----------------------
The ruby-talk.org mailing-list archive is down at the moment. Use
nagaokaut.ac.jp instead.
* Ruby Cookbook now in PDF format
---------------------------------
Last week, many people said they would like a PDF version of the
Ruby
Cookbook.
Good news, reports Leonard Richardson, "O'Reilly is now selling
the
Ruby Cookbook as a downloadable PDF for 50% off the cover price.
AFAIK
this is the first full-length O’Reilly book to be sold as PDF,
and if
it goes well, other O’Reilly books should follow."
* Ruport Day has begun!
-----------------------
Ruport Day came and went (a day to make improvements to the
Ruport
project, complete with prizes). Gregory B. writes “The overall
winner, who deserves massive props is James H., who introduced
SVG
Graph support, as well as a sizeable chunk of documentation to
the
project”.
Ibroadfo was second, Eric P. third, followed by James Edward
Gray
II.
Gregory would like to get in contact with the maintainer of
SVG::Graph, to talk about how it could be packaged for Ruport
(e.g. a
gem).
* Ruby Inside offers $100 prize for blogging about Ruby between
---------------------------------------------------------------
August 12-19
------------
Ruby Inside is offering a $100 prize to a random blogger who
creates
and posts an interesting post about Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails in
the
forthcoming week, along with a $15 second prize to a random
person who
links to the contest. As a aggregator of Ruby content, Ruby
Inside is
suffering during the summer lull, so perhaps this could get some
new,
interesting content out into the wild.
* OS X Leopard shipping with Rails!
-----------------------------------
Daniel S. reported that MacOS X Leopard will include
Ruby,
RubyGems and Rails. Apple have been shipping Ruby with their
operating
system since around 2002, but in the past there have been old
versions
or little issues that caused problems for Rails. For this
release,
Apple have been communicating with the Rails core team to ensure
everything’s done right.
DHH blogs:
> It's been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by
the
> Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running
on
> Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see
> Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.
People are particularly pleased that Apple's using RubyGems, so
updating Rails and installing other Ruby libraries will work as
Rubyists expect.
* Microsoft Phasing in Support for Dynamic Languages on .Net
------------------------------------------------------------
An interesting article at eWEEK.com about dynamic languages on
Microsoft's .NET platform, with lots of quotes from IronPython
creator
Jim Hugunin and John L. (of RubyCLR fame).
"People say they love a language like Ruby because it has this
simplicity and this dynamism."
* Tim B. (Sun Microsystems) on Ruby
-------------------------------------
Tim B., the Directory of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems
(and
recent contributor to the Ruby community) wrote a mostly-positive
article “On Ruby” describing his initial experiences.
User Group News
* mkerb.org - Milwaukee RUG Meeting [August 9]
----------------------------------------------
The Milwaukee RUG (Wisconsin, U.S.) had their latest meeting on
August
9. Thanks to SpiderLogic for providing space for the meeting.
* Phoenix Ruby U. Group August Meeting
----------------------------------------
James B.: "The Phoenix Ruby U. Group will hold its August
meeting on Monday, August 14, 2006, at 6:15pm. The meeting will
be
held at facilities graciously provided by Cyclone Commerce."
Threads
Ruby stable branch is…1.9?
Is Ruby 1.9 the stable branch? No, 1.8 is still the latest stable
branch,
but 1.9 will become a stable branch in the future.
RubyConf in Second Life?
John L. had an idea of holding a virtual equivalent to RubyConf in
`Second Life’ (SL), a “a privately-owned, partly subscription-based
3-D
virtual world” [wikipedia], run by Linden Labs.
Charles O Nutter said there is already a SL rubylist community that
meets
every first and third Thursday of each month. “Feel free to stop by,
we’re
interested in having more folks attend, and there’s a nice big
presentation screen and plenty of seating. There’s even an in-world
IRB
extension to play with Ruby while you’re there.”
Einrichtung einer deutschsprachigen Ruby-Newsgroup (bitte lesen!)
Christian J. proposed creating the newsgroup “de.comp.lang.ruby”
for
German-language Ruby discussions, but Josef `Jupp’ Schugt suggested
“de.alt.ruby” instead, as it’s much easier to create a newsgroup
under
“de.alt” than the general “de” hierachy.
Stefan S. said that the lack of traffic in “de.comp.lang.misc”
was a
bad sign for the proposed group, and James B. linked to
gmane.comp.lang.ruby.german.
LDAP
barjunk asked which LDAP libraries people prefer, and the answer was
Net::LDAP.
Austin Z. pointed out that it’s the only pure-Ruby LDAP library.
The
alternative is ruby-ldap, a binding to a C LDAP library.
Francis C. added: “Get Net::LDAP and read the Rdoc for
Net::LDAP#open. As Austin said, this library is very disciplined (and
documented) about how it uses the network (unlike the native-C
libraries),
and it’s pure Ruby- no compiler needed on any platform.”
why doesn’t Array include Comparable
Ara T. Howard asked why Array, which does has a meaningful <=>
(spaceship)
operator, doesn’t include the Comparable mixin. Comparable adds <, >,
<=,
between? etc. methods.
A couple of people agreed that it would be useful.
Proper Case (#89)
Elliot T. was behind last week’s Ruby Q., to write a method
that
correctly capitalises the words in English sentences.
Pen and Paper (#90)
This week’s Ruby Q. asks you to write a program to play a simple
pen-and-paper game, involving a grid of numbers. The quiz was written
by
Eric D…
FSF Award. Guido / Larry won it, why not matz?
Gregory B. nominated Matz for the 2006 FSF Award for the
Advancement of
Free Software, noting that Guido and Larry (Python, Perl creators
respectively) have previously received it.
New Releases
Mongrel 0.3.13.4 Pre-Release – PID Files Working
Zed S. asks people to try out the latest Mongrel pre-release. “This
release is pretty close to becoming official.”
“Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended
for
hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather
than
FastCGI or SCGI. It is framework agnostic and already supports Ruby
On
Rails, Og+Nitro, and Camping frameworks.”
Pandora 0.4.3 Release
Wiki-engine Pandora has a new search function, common-book sidebar,
site-wide menu, bug fixes and more, said Julian I. Kamil.
He also explained what makes it different from other Wiki engines:
it uses a `book’ metaphor for managing its contents. As a Pandora
user,
you would publish books, with chapters, and pages. As the
publisher, you
decide who can author the books contents, who can edit them, and
who can
view them. All of these and the associated user management
functions are
built into the system.
See ‘The Ruby Bookshelf’ for an example.
Dr Nic’s Magic Models
Dr Nic’s Magic Models dazzled the crowd. This is a library that lets
you
access your ActiveRecord objects with even less work than before.
Actually, there’s no work now. You don’t even need to declare your
model
classes.
Say you have an empty Rails project, with a database having
people',groups’ and `membership’ tables. Just open up a console
and
start manipulating your objects:
person = Person.find(1)
=> <Person:0x3958930 @attributes={“lastname”=>“Williams”,
“firstname”=>“Nic”,
“id”=>“1”, “email”=>“[email protected]”}>person.memberships
=> [<Membership:0x393a000 @attributes={“group_id”=>“1”, “id”=>“1”,
“person_id”=>“1”}>]person.groups
=> [<Group:0x390df60 @attributes={“name”=>“Magic Models Forum”,
“id”=>“1”, “description”=>nil}>]
The above example, taken from the Magic Models homepage, demonstrates
that
even has_many :through relationships are automatically discovered.
Zerenity 1.0
“Zerenity is an almost clone of Zenity for Ruby. It allows for the
easy
creation of simple graphical dialogs from a Ruby script.” (Using
Ruby/GTK2.)
It’s written by Farrel L… The 1.0 version adds a significant
number
of unit tests.
RFuzz 0.7 – Win32, Bug Fix, Browser Begins
Zed S. put out another RFuzz release.
“RFuzz is an HTTP client library that you can use in combination with
a
random junk generator to conduct fuzzing tests against any HTTP
server (or
web app). It’s not limited to fuzzing, as the HTTP client can work as
a
Net/HTTP replacement, and you can easily just make regular requests.”
RubyPhone project updated
Gregarican: “This project ports the TSAPI (Telephony Services API)
library
to Ruby so you can create CTI applications using the power, fun, and
flexibility of Ruby.”
There is now a CSTA Simulator, to simulate a PBX.
rcov 0.7.0 (code coverage for Ruby)
The rcov code-coverage tool now has an-aggregate option, to merge
results
from multiple runs, and some bugs were fixed, Mauricio F.
announced.
open4-0.5.0
Ara T. Howard added timeouts to open4, a version of the open method
to "
open child process with handles on pid, stdin, stdout, and stderr:
manage
child processes and their io handles easily."
Ruby Reports 0.4.21, 0.4.23
Gregory B. optimistically released the “Probably Broken” Edition
of
Ruby Reports. “This is the 8th release since the start of Google’s
Summer
of Code”.
This development release removes the old data-structures that were
exposed
to Ruport designers.
It was indeed broken, and version 0.4.23 followed, fixing
Ruport::Query.
There is now a proof-of-concept Invoice Engine, and a tool to create
skeleton config files etc.
Rails 1.1.6: Stronger fix, backports, and full disclosure
David Heinemeier H. announced Rails 1.1.6, with a better fix for
the
recent security issue around routing. Only 1.1.x releases were
vunerable
(1.0.x are ok), and the fix has been backported to each affected
release.
The fix breaks third-party engines, but there is an interim
workaround
that you can use until these are updated (just block certain URLs).
There is now a rails-security mailing list (announcements only), and
a
#rails-security IRC channel on Freenet.
Cerberus 0.2.0
Anatol P.: “Cerberus is a Continuous Builder software for Ruby.
Cerberus could be periodically run from scheduler and check if
application
tests are broken. If it happens then Cerberus will send notification
to
project developers.”
Ruby In Steel 0.75
Huw C.: “This release includes significantly enhanced
colour
coding and collapsing for both Ruby and Rails (RHTML) files and
provides
support for debugging support for Ruby In Rails. Previous versions
only
provided debugging for standard Ruby projects. The Ruby In Steel IDE
is
hosted within Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 (Standard edition or
better).”