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.

• European Rails Conf -- talk proposals now being accepted (ruby-talk)

David A. Black: “We’re now accepting proposals for talks at the European Rails Conference, to be held September 14-15 in London. Accepted speakers will get free admission to the conference.”

Proposals must be submitted by July 21, 2006.

“David, for Ruby Central, Inc. and Skills Matter, Ltd., co-producers of the 2006 European Rails Conference”.

• European Rubyists (ruby-talk)

Austin Ziegler is taking a vacation in Europe soon, and would like to meet up with European Rubyists.

• Munich.rb -- User Group Meeting in Munich, Germany (ruby-talk)

Urban Hafner’s trying to organise a meeting in Munich on July 15th or 16th, in response to Austin’s message that he’d be in Munich some time in July. Is anyone else interested?

• Ruby Ireland - Irish ruby and rails user group (comp.lang.ruby)

Aidan Finn has formed a mailing list for Irish Ruby users who are keen on forming Ruby and/or Rails groups.

• Northern Virginia Ruby user's group meeting 6/28/06 (ruby-talk)

The NovaRUG group (Northern Virginia, U.S.) met on the 28th June. The next meeting is on July 19.

RAA and web services? (ruby-talk)

Daniel Berger: “Does the RAA have any sort of web service backend? I saw hints that it might be added at some point but nothing definite.”

There were not yet any replies.

Iconv and incompatible encodings (ruby-talk)

Alex Young wanted to “lossily convert between partially incompatible encodings”, such as from UTF-8 to 7-bit ASCII.

Paul Battley said that the iconv library has ”//IGNORE” and ”//TRANSLIT” options for ignoring or transliterating unconvertable characters. He gave the example of converting “caffè” into “caff” or “caff`e”, and also showed how to turn it into “caffe” with the Unicode library.

Why is there no Smalltalk-like IDE for Ruby? (comp.lang.ruby)

See also the same topic in ruby-talk.

Joseph Moore: “I shout my question to the entire Ruby + Smalltalk community: Smalltalk has had amazing IDEs for decades, why not Ruby? Smalltalkers, Ruby needs your help!”

There were many replies.

The Smalltalk language itself has a high level of integration with its development environment, rather than the IDE being bolted-on as an afterthought.

In Ruby (as with most languages) the entire ‘world’ of the program is re-created each time it is run, whereas a Smalltalk program is image-based (in most implementations), and evolves over time, preserving its state even when it is ‘restarted’.

So, for example, in order for a Ruby IDE to work out what methods a class has, it must perform complex analysis of the static source code text (and since methods may be conditionally defined at runtime, this is impossible to do perfectly in all cases). In Smalltalk, the system knows what methods the class has: it just needs to look at its current state.

Some advantages of Ruby’s ‘re-create world from plain-text sources files’, and in general having a separation between development environment and language runtime, were also put forward.

m17n and unicode (ruby-talk)

The difference between m17n and unicode, as described by Logan Capaldo:

Unicode says, lets make ONE universal character set and map all our strings into it.

m17n says not every language is the same, not every concept of a character is the same, let’s support all the languages and character sets we can.

Ruby’s m17n will have support for Unicode, but it will be an option for an encoding, not the only encoding.

Summer of code: ruby-breakpoint GUI client (ruby-talk)

Florian Gross’ Google Summer of Code project (ruby-breakpoint improvements) was discussed, particularly regarding a GUI vs web interface for visualising Ruby objects.

Florian: “I still think that a real GUI client will be able to do things that are hard to do with a web one, though, so I’ll focus on the GUI one first.”

Rational about the Gem package format? (ruby-talk)

Why is the gem package format a tarball containing files “data.tar.gz” and “metadata.gz” (plus now two corresponding ”.sig” files)?

“Why not just have the metadata stored in with the data and not worry about double layers?”, asked Trans.

Mauricio Fernandez explained that to extract a single file from a .tar.gz (gzipped tarball), you must first decompress the entire file, so if this was necessary then extracting the meta-data would be slow and use a lot of memory. (Although he noted that RubyGems currently decompresses the entire file into memory anyway.)

The format is also easy to extend – simply add more files to the outer layer. As well, the “data.tar.gz” can be constructed before “metadata.gz”, enabling the latter to easily store a cryptographic digest of the data.

Regex Comparison Causing Massive Memory Usage (ruby-talk)

A regular expression in Charset.is_utf8(str) from the SOAP library was examined after Mike Harris reported that passing in a 200 KB string resulted in memory usage exceeding 2 GB.

Xavier Noria said that the regex could potentially cause a lot of unnecessary backtracking, and Florian Gross proposed a change to prevent the problem.

QInputDialog syntax (ruby-talk)

Graham Smith was having trouble converting between the C++ syntax used in the Qt documentation, and what is needed for QtRuby. (Qt is a multi-platform GUI toolkit, used most prominently in KDE.)

Ed Borasky highly recommended the Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby PDF from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. It’s written by Caleb Tennis and costs US$8.50 (it’s a “Friday” book).

Pau Garcia i Quiles seconded the recommendation, and also said “C++ GUI Programming with Qt3” is a good book if you’re going to be doing serious Qt development (even though it is C++ oriented).

Your editor stopped halfway through writing this summary to buy the PDF, and it does indeed look like a nice introduction :-)

Time To Pick the Mongrel BUGS Mascot! (ruby-talk)

Zed Shaw (the author of the Mongrel Ruby web application server) was sent a page of ugly ugly ugly dogs by Bradley Taylor, and he just had to use one of them for the Mongrel BUGS mascot (replacing the current beetle).

The group sent in their favourite choices. “I like MISS ELLIE” was all James Edward Gray II had to say.

RedLetter Ruby Journal (ruby-talk)

The RedLetter Ruby Journal faltered without any publications, as its editor Sam Flywheel was apparently unable to attract enough writers.

Several people complained that they had not yet received refunds on their subscriptions despite requesting them, and Pat Eyler noticed Sam had now announced “Tabula: The Journal of MySQL Development”.

PDF::Writer and i18n (comp.lang.ruby)

Pawel Chmielewski asked about representing non-English characters with PDF::Writer, as the library didn’t appear to support UTF-8.

Austin Ziegler, the library’s author, said that PDF::Writer will never support UTF-8 directly, because its not in the PDF standard.

The default character set used by PDF::Writer is similar to Latin-1, and additional characters are supported via “encoding character maps”. This is briefly described in the PDF::Writer manual, and the documentation will be expanded in the next release.

creating graphical application with video (ruby-talk)

Geert Fannes: “I have to teach my sister how to create an application that can show pictures and small video files on a windows-based system and get some user input in return. Being able to work fullscreen is optional, but would be nice.”

Ilmari Heikkinen suggested Ruby/SDL or Ruby-GNOME2 + gstreamer.

Geert managed to get streaming video working with Ruby/SDL, using the “smpeg” library, but felt its performance wasn’t very good. He plans to try SDL with “ffmpeg” instead (and hopes there is an existing Ruby library wrapping SDL/ffmpeg).

“The good thing is that I could compile both SDL and ffmpeg using MinGW” under Windows.

C-Style Ints (#85) (ruby-talk)

Ruby Quiz this week is by Aaron Patterson.

Write a class that can represent a signed or unsigned number with an arbitrary number of bits. This class should support all bitwise operations ( & ^ ~ | ), basic math operations ( + – / * ), and comparison operators.

RubyScript2Exe 0.4.3 (ruby-talk)

Erik Veenstra made a new RubyScript2Exe release, with improved RubyGems support, and followed it up with version 0.4.4 to fix a bug that was introduced.

“RubyScript2Exe transforms your Ruby script into a standalone, compressed Windows, Linux or Mac OS X (Darwin) executable.”

id3lib-ruby 0.4.0 (Unicode fixes) (ruby-talk)

id3lib-ruby by Robin Stocker now works properly with Unicode frames, and some methods in the API were renamed.

KirbyBase 2.6 (ruby-talk)

Jamey Cribbs: “I would like to announce version 2.6 of KirbyBase, a small, pure-Ruby database management system that stores its data in plain-text files.”

It no longer over-rides NilClass#method_missing.

na_str-0.0.0 : combining narray with mmap for persistant numerical data (ruby-talk)

na_str is a new library that will intrigue users of NArray (a library for “fast calculation and easy manipulation of large numerical arrays into the Ruby language”).

Written by Ara. T. Howard, it provides a way of sharing NArray data with other Ruby objects. An example library, na_map, combines NArray and mmap so that data can be modified “with no explicit io on the users part and partial change[s] to numerical grids can occur very quickly and persistently.”

Interestingly, na_str uses rb_str_new4() internally. This creates a string that shares an internal memory region with another.

Mongrel 0.3.13.3 Needs Debuggers (ruby-talk)

Zed Shaw needs people to test the 0.3.13.3 pre-release.

See also Mongrel 0.3.13.2 Pre-Release—RailsConf, which included a change to try and “reap dead threads as soon as possible,” especially when there are too many open files.

For SciTE Users: Snippets (ruby-talk)

Mitchell Foral created a Lua module for SciTE that mimicks the Textmate editor’s “snippet” system.

From the documentation:

Basically, snippets are pieces of text inserted into a document, but can execute shell code at run-time, contain placeholders for additional information to be added, and make simple transforms on that information. This is much more powerful than SciTE’s abbreviation expansion system.

The website includes screencasts.

RMagick 1.13.0 (comp.lang.ruby)

RMagick, the Ruby library for the ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick image-manipulation libraries, had some bugs fixed and features added, including Image#auto_orient to automatically orient an image from its EXIF data.

If you’re using a web hosting service and it has a very old version of RMagick installed, please consider asking your service provider to upgrade. I’ve fixed several memory leaks in recent releases so if you’re running into memory usage problems with your web app upgrading could really pay off.

fUnit-0.1.3 - A Fortran Unit Testing Framework (comp.lang.ruby)

Bil Kleb posted “funit”, a Fortran unit testing framework (where you write tests in Ruby).

(Correction by Bil: “Actually, the tests are written in Fortran with assertion extensions expanded by Ruby into Fortran.”)

Radiant CMS 0.5 - Grindstone (ruby-talk)

John W. Long quietly set loose the first official release of Radiant, “a no-fluff content management system designed for small teams.”

Ruby Reports 0.4.11 (ruby-talk)

Ruport 0.4.11, the “Mr. Sparkle” Edition, was released by Gregory Brown. This is a cleanup and bugfix release, and also has a couple of new features.

In other news, Dudley Flanders has joined the project as a developer, more documentation will soon be written (including a Ruport cookbook), and the developers now hang out on the #ruport IRC channel on freenode.

RubyGems 0.9.0 Release (ruby-talk)

Jim Weirich announced the “much anticipated” release of RubyGems 0.9.0.

This release includes a number of new features and bug fixes. The number one change is that we can now download the gem index incrementally. This will greatly speed up the gem command when only a few gems are out of date.

Support for authenticating proxies and improved integration with documentation tools were also added.

mkrf 0.1.0 released (ruby-talk)

Kevin Clark’s mkrf had its first release. mkrf is similar in purpose to mkmf (and mkmf2), but creates Rakefiles instead of Makefiles (it is used for building Ruby C extensions).

Asked how it compares with mkmf2, he enumerated advantages of using Rakefiles over Makefiles (gem packaging, rdoc generation built in …), and also said he was keeping the code clean so it could be incorporated into RubyGems at some point.

Ruby-GNOME2-0.15.0 (ruby-talk)

Masao Mutoh released Ruby-GNOME2-0.15.0. It now includes Ruby interfaces to VTE (terminal emulator widget), Poppler (PDF rendering library), bug fixes and other improvements.