Ruby Weekly News

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 Sutherland.

• DABlog (ruby-talk)
David A. Black announced a new Ruby blog: DABlog, and in its first post said:

I’ve never been a fan of the term “blog”, so I’m doing an end run around it by naming this log after myself. Anyone who wants to think of it as “Da Blog” may do so, and I get to think of it as the log of David A. Black. So everyone is happy.

• A new home for RubyForge (ruby-talk)

RubyForge is no longer hosted in Rich Kilmer’s basement, thanks to Ruby Central and lots of work from Rich and Tom Copeland.

Tom: “May RubyForge’s next three years be as lively as its first three…”

• RubyConf 2006 talk proposals now being accepted (ruby-talk)

David A. Black: “In case you missed it the first time (and rather a lot of you seem to have…)”, you are now able to submit RubyConf 2006 talk proposals.

“You can, and you should, and if you intend to, you MUST!”

The deadline is June 30, 2006.

• Ruby Beach group in Miami/Fort Lauderdale (comp.lang.ruby)

In the last newsletter we saw a post calling out to Ruby users in Miami/Fort Lauderdale. There were several followups this week, saying that two groups in South Florida have recently formed and had their first meetings: South Florida Rubyists and RubyRailsSofla.

General API design question: FooError vs Foo::Error (ruby-talk)

Daniel Berger wondered about the convention for exception naming after noticing that e.g. TimeoutError in the ‘timeout’ standard library is now deprecated in favour of Timeout::Error.

There were no replies.

Problems with Ruby and C++ (ruby-talk)

In this thread Paul Brannan linked to a valgrind suppressions file for Ruby. Developers of C extensions can use this for debugging memory issues.

pp Pascal (#84) (ruby-talk)

This week’s Ruby Quiz is by Dirk Meijer, and challenges you to write a Ruby program that outputs Pascal’s Triangles.

templating systems (comp.lang.ruby)

A list of Ruby templating systems was given by Trans:

eruby is the most common as it is one of the first and comes with Ruby. Rails apps use it. There are also plenty of others. Amrita is very nice one for instance. And Facets include a TAL (tag attribute language) in rtals.rb. I beleive Kwartz is another that’s maintained, and the list goes on. I think somewhere there’s even an attempt at an emulation of Perl’s template toolkit.

Radius is another option.

Rails Live CD (comp.lang.ruby)

Brian Ketelsen’s “Rails Live CD” has had tremendous progress over the last few weeks.

The CD boots into Linux, with Ruby, Rails, MySQL, RadRails and more ready for you to play with. There is also a “VMWare Player Virtual Appliance” available.

Whats new/fixed in Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.0 (ruby-talk)

In an otherwise dismal thread, Matz made an interesting comment regarding Ruby 1.9 and 2.0: “All major incompatibility shall be introduced by 1.9 hopefully”.

New RMagick tutorial: Web 2.0 Graphics (ruby-talk)

Timothy Hunter created a new RMagick tutorial that shows you how to ” dynamically create images with transparency, the “glass” effect, gradients, shadows, and text.”

RMagick is a Ruby library for the ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick image-processing tools.

ALSA bindings? (comp.lang.ruby)

Phil Tomson asked if anyone had created Ruby bindings for ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). Hans Fugal didn’t think so, but said he’d be interested in helping out and integrating it with his ruby/audio library.

GeoCoding API updates (ruby-talk)

Eric Hodel’s Yahoo, Google and geocoder.us geocoding APIs are now joined by one for MetaCarta.

mongrel_cluster 0.2.0 -- Mongrel 0.3.13 Compliant (ruby-talk)

Bradley Taylor’s mongrel_cluster had some features added, and the license changed.

“Mongrel_cluster is a GemPlugin that wrappers the mongrel HTTP server and simplifies the deployment of webapps using a cluster of mongrel servers.”

Syndication 0.6 (RSS & Atom parsing) (comp.lang.ruby)

Syndication 0.6 has new experimental support for Google Calendar feeds. “This module provides classes for parsing web syndication feeds in RSS and Atom formats”, written by mathew.

Radius 0.5.1 -- Powerful Tag-Based Templates (ruby-talk)

John W. Long fixed a bug in Radius, a tag-based template language for Ruby.

“It uses tags similar to XML, but can be used to generate any form of plain text (HTML, e-mail, etc…). Radiant CMS currently uses Radius in its unique templating system.”

Announcing Beta Release of GP Ruby.NET Compiler (ruby-talk)

Wayne Kelly (of Queensland University of Technology): “We are pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a Ruby Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler.”

The compiler can be used to statically compile a Ruby source file into a verifiable .NET v2.0 assembly or it can be used to directly execute a Ruby source file (compile, load and execute). Our implementation is not yet fully complete, but it is the only Ruby compiler that we know of for either the .NET or JVM platforms that is able to pass all 871 tests in the samples/test.rb installation test suite of Ruby 1.8.2.

The software is developed by Wayne Kelly, Douglas Stockwell, Brian Blackwell, Chien Jon Soon and Wayne Reid, and receives some sponsorship from Microsoft. It is realised under a liberal free software license (BSD-like).

Sanxiyn posted a followup Compiling GP Ruby.NET Compiler on Mono.

Mongrel 0.3.13.1 -- Quick Small Fixes (ruby-talk)

Zed Shaw fixed a small bug in Mongrel, corrected some documentation, and (thanks to Jonas Pfenniger) added RedirectHandler for doing redirects.

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.

rubyFreenet 0.1 (ruby-talk)

Phillip Hutchings created a Ruby interface to Freenet Client Protocol 2.0, for the “decentralised anonymous network that provides data storage services”.

ruby-prof-0.4.0 (ruby-talk)

Charlie Savage and Shugo Maeda’s ruby-prof had a new release “chock full of new features”.

It’s faster (now 15-50% overhead), supports multiple threads, has cross-referenced html reports, “vastly improved documentation”, Windows support, a gem, and more.

Yeah, wow.

Mongrel 0.3.13.2 -- RailsConf 2006 Release (ruby-talk)

Zed Shaw found some time at RailsConf 2006 to make some improvements to Mongrel, such as notification filters (see the mongrel_upload_progress gem by _why and Rick Olsen).