Ruby Weekly News

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 Sutherland.

• RuportDay2006: A day of fun, prizes, and reporting software!

Gregory Brown 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 Ruby Culture T-Shirts!

Matt Todd designed a bunch of shirts expressing Ruby culture, with Ruby code, quotes (especially from _why), Japanese animals etc.

In Speaking of T-shirts…, Hal Fulton 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 Britt’s RubyStuff.

• RUBY ROUC conference

[Added 2006-08-10]

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.

• 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).

• Ruby/Rails User Groups in Southern California

The Orange County Ruby Users Group have a formal meeting every fourth Thursday, reported Scott Hodson. 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 Clark.

“Chris Abad 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.”

• Bug or Feature?

Tammo Freese: “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).”

• 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 :-)

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 Nakamura 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 Nakamura 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 Gray 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 Heikkinen recalled some discussion around adding OCaml support to RubyInline, and asked “did anything come out of that?”

Motiro 0.4.2

Thiago Arrais 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!”