11th - 17th September 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 this week by Robert Postill.

Articles and Announcements

  • Ruby-GetText-Package-1.8.0

    • Masao Mutoh announced the latest version of the Ruby-Gettext. Useful for those of you with an international application.

  • Chronic-0.1.0

    • Here is the initial release notice for the library Chronic. From the announcement text:
    Chronic is a natural language date/time parser written in pure Ruby. See below for the wide variety of formats Chronic will parse.
    Congratulations to those involved and best of luck in the future! :)

  • Ruby-IXP 1.0.0

    • Ruby-IXP, an implementation of the 9P2000 protocol has made its way to version 1.0. It features improvements and bugfixes so its probably a good release to upgrade to.

  • RubyPhone project updated

    • RubyPhone has reached version 0.2. RubyPhone “provides a CTI library that allows a developer to work with their PBX using Ruby”. So that’s good news for telephony folk then.

  • RFuzz 0.9 -- The Evil of Broken Sockets

    • Zed Shaw announced the latest incarnation of RFuzz, which Zed descibes as “a small project to make it easy for you to write scripts that test any HTTP web application at various levels of destruction”. Apparently if that isn’t appealing enough (and who wouldn’t want to break a webapp now and again?) it also “A full but very small thin and fast HTTP client library that’s right at the bare metal. It’s very clear and you can plug in notifiers to watch every stage of the request”. So now you have no excuse not to implement HTTP in yours, do you?

  • Thousands of words on Ruby

    • Tim Bray has finished a veritable feast of readable material on Ruby here, which is about Ruby and Java as well as Ruby itself.

  • ZenTest 3.4.0 Released

    • Ryan Davis declared that the latest version of ZenTest was available. Be prepared for thirteen minor enhancements and five bugfixes for this useful package.

  • "Design patterns of 1972", by MJD

    • An interesting article discussing the desirability of patterns was posted, which casts some illumination on why Ruby is so cool.

  • Re : Re : [ANN] Wirble 0.1.1: Irb Enhancements for the Masses

    • Wirble is a set of enhancements for irb announced by Paul Duncan. The release of v0.1.1 Wirble generated some discussion. The discussion discussed irb and windows and the location of the gems for this package.

  • TextMate book now in beta

    • Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmers (you know, the folk who did the Pickaxe book) announced that their Textmate book is nearing publication. I’m sure the Mac fraternity will be most pleased.

  • codeforpeople's rubyforge 0.2.1 released

    • A minor update with some packaging and rdoc fixes.

Threads

How to read and write 80 column punched cards with Ruby

Before I spotted this thread I honestly believed no one used punched cards anymore but no, they really do. So I included this thread as a homage to all those people who got taught about punched cards at school or university as proof that those brain cells aren’t wasted. Anyway, this thread talks about reflection and method_missing as well as the best data structure for the problem domain.

A fun Ruport IRB hack to create a minimal SQL client

Sometimes something just has to be done. This post falls firmly into that category. You’d probably not sell it to a customer but it really is interesting, just to see it can be done.

DRAW 1280, 1024

Benjohn Barnes kicked off a thread that took us back to the 80’s with this thread regarding the display of simple graphics. Via irb, LOGO and various graphics libraries this thread we get a smaple of what Ruby has graphics-wise. I’m wondering if Benjohn has a plan to recreate the mighty Elite in Ruby?

Joel Spolsky on languages for web programmingr

Dido Sevilla kicked off a marathon thread after reading a missive from Joe Spolsky. Essentially the thread brook into:
  • Do you need many more boxes than a .Net deployment? Matz said no.
  • Joel’s opinion was interesting considering the fact he uses his own language.
  • Ruby use in large environments
  • Risk management in development
  • VMs and Forth…
  • MYSQL and DHH’s approach to databases
  • The use of C with Ruby
The conclusions of which broadly suggest Joel wasn’t correct in all his assertions but he sure knows how to kick off a good argument :)

A solution for public-keyed SFTP and Ruby

Pau Garcia i Quiles has been thinking about SCP and Ruby so he posted a code snippet that allows for a key exchange. This looks quite handy but Pau acknowledge that “The SSHAgent class comes from http://paste.lisp.org/display/6912 (I don’t know who its author is or the license that code is released under)” so a little care before use is required.