5th - 11th December 2005

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week’s activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland.

Articles and Announcements

  • Houston ruby and / or rails user group?

    • Keith Lancaster has left his job to launch a startup, with Rails as the primary technology, and is “looking for like-minded folks in Houston, Texas. Does anyone know if there is a user group (ruby and/or rails) in Houston? If there is not, would anyone be interested in participating in one?”

  • RWB: call for feedback|developers

    • Pat Eyler issued a call for feedback and developers for the Ruby Work Bench (RWB) project, which provides performance and load tests for websites.

    He doesn’t have enough time to add all the features he wants, and also needs feedback from people for even more ideas.

  • XML Transformations using REXML

    • James Britt: “Toot toot! That’s the sound of my own horn.”

    The 30th Anniversary edition of Dr. Dobb’s Journal – January 2006 – includes an article Transforming XML & the REXML Pull Parser by (guess who) James Britt.

  • interesting book sales news

    • Pay Eyler linked to an article on the O’Reilly Radar entitled Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python.

    DHH posted his take on it, noting that at the moment there is only one published book on Rails, and one recent Ruby book. “Compare that to the wealth of titles available for Python, Perl, and Java. Now imagine what those numbers will look like when the market is flooded with new titles in the beginning of the new year.”

  • Phoenix.rb : Phoenix Ruby Users Group

    • James Britt, the refresher of the Phoenix.rb Users’ Group, is proposing a meeting for the 19th of December. Contact him if you’re interested.

  • CLOSING SHOP! XML:Tools, bindings for libxml and libxslt

    • Trans announced that he would no longer be hosting the libxml and libxslt bindings, and requested that a new maintainer step forward. Ross Bamford said he’d give it a go.

    Update 14 December 2005: Trans writes

    UPDATE. Sean Crittenden, the original author of the bindings, appearently frequents these parts quietly. He’s come back out and will remain project head of the libxml/libxsl projects on Rubyforge, but Bob Showalter will take on active management and Ross Bamford will be active senior developer. Also, the license looks like it will change to MIT too (yeah!)

    So after long last, Ruby will finally have fresh and well maintained binding to libxml2!!!

  • Subversion support on RubyForge

    • Tom Copeland: “RubyForge now supports Subversion! Yup, at long last, we’ve got all the pieces in place so that you can use either CVS or Subversion for your version control.”

    And yes, existing projects using CVS can be converted over.

    Replies included !, !! and even in one case !!! exclamation marks. I think that means people are happy.

  • Ruby Code & Style is looking for articles.

    • James Britt said that the online journal Ruby Code & Style is looking for articles for its second edition.

    We focus on bringing high-quality articles, written by Rubyists all over the world, showcasing the strengths of Ruby and the ingenuity of its users in solving real-life, non-trivial problems.

    We’re looking for technical Ruby articles primarily geared toward experienced Ruby developers. Submissions are peer reviewed by our remarkable advisory board, which includes eminent members of the Ruby community (he’s not kidding – Ed).

  • Ruby: A New Danger

    • Hampton posted a 200MB video he created showing that Ruby is dangerous (for Fortran programmers). Recommended, oh yeah.

    Don’t let Lispers or Smalltalkers watch it though.

Threads

One-Click Ruby Installer

The one in which Curt Hibbs says the One-Click Ruby Installer won’t be updated to Ruby 1.8.3, but will sync with 1.8.4 when it is released at the end of December.

Kalah (#58)

Mark Van Holstyn created this week’s Ruby Quiz – to create a player for the board-game “Kalah”.

:-) Sharing a Shower Moment :-)

Surprisingly, not spam. Duck wisdom, the best of which was Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s “If a duck quacks in the woods… Does anyone.respond_to? his calls?”

IL Generator syntax proposal

John Lam is rewriting his Ruby <=> CLR (.NET) bridge, with the plan to write as much of the code as possible in Ruby, rather than in Managed C++. To this end, he had prototyped some syntax for an IL (Intermediate Language) generation library.

He went on to implement the proposal, see RbDynamicMethod first drop.

An example for converting CLR exceptions into Ruby ones:

create_ruby_method('convert_clr_exception') do
  try
    ldstr    'error'
    newobj   'Exception.ctor(String)'
    throw_ex
  catch_ex   'Exception'
    call     'static ExceptionHelper.RaiseRubyException(Exception)'
  end_try
  ldc_i4_4
  ret
end

Detecting control-c?

William E. Rubin asked how to detect when a user presses ctrl-c (i.e. sends the INTerrupt signal), and Joe Van Dyk said that this will do it:

trap("INT") do
  puts "got signal INT" 
end

Equation graphing software?

Steve Litt pondered creating graphs of equations like y=x**2+5 from Ruby.

Eric Lavigne suggested gnuplot, by having Ruby output gnuplot commands, and G.Durga Prasad noted the rgplot Ruby library for tighter integration.

For non-Ruby solutions, Dan Diebolt pointed out GNU Octave (a free software clone of Matlab), which uses GNU Graph for graphics. You can also use Graph separately. (Kevin Brown is currently writing a Ruby binding for it.)

rflickr

Nate Agrin asked if anyone else was using the “rflickr” library to access the Flickr API, as he was having some problems with flickr.auth.getToken.

“it would also be nice to get anyone who is working on rflickr to form some sort of breakout group, so we could pass information around a bit faster.”

There were no replies after 6 days.

Oniguruma -- when?

Hal Fulton enquired as to when the new regular expression engine Oniguruma would be merged into Ruby. It provides features beyond the current engine, such as look-behind, named and non-captured groups and support for many character encodings.

Phil Tomson said you can configure Ruby 1.8.3 at compile time to use it, while James Edward Gray II said that the word was that it wouldn’t be default until Ruby 2.0, for fear of breaking compatibility.

Calling ASP C# web service from Ruby?

mmm was getting encoding errors when trying to call a SOAP web service running under ASP.NET, from Ruby.

Tsume said that 
soap_client.default_encodingstyle = 
  SOAP::EncodingStyle::ASPDotNetHandler::Namespace
would fix the issue, caused by non-standardness in Microsoft’s SOAP implementation.

The problem was also behind the thread Ruby SOAP client communication with Microsoft .NET webservice.

Semi-OT: Red Crystal - Ruby is taking off everywhere

New Releases

lazy.rb 0.2

MenTaLguY released a new version of his lazy evaluation library lazy.rb.

Object#inspect no longer forces the evaluation of a promise, Kernel#force was renamed Kernel#demand, and a new API for lazy streams was added.

FireRuby 0.4.1

Fixes to FireRuby to support 64-bit platforms were added by Peter Wood, with help from David Walthour.

FireRuby is a library for accessing the Firebird open-source relational database system.

Rails RC5 (0.14.4): Next stop one-oh (really, this time!)

David Heinemeier Hansson said that Rails RC 5 is out, and this one really is the last before the 1.0 release.

“We’ve fixed a ton of major, minor, and aesthetic issues and now have a package that we would be very proud to call 1.0.”

So upgrade, dammit! Now. And stand by as we finish setting up the fireworks planned for next week’s release of the long-awaited 1.0. It’s magical times, my friends, and the spellcasting is just getting started.

Update 14 December 2005: ‘Next week’ means today. 1.0 is out now.