Ruby Weekly News

Ruby Weekly News takes a look at the week’s discussions on the ruby-talk mailing list (and its equivalents, the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and Ruby forum).

This edition is brought to you by Tim Sutherland and Robert Postill.

• New O'Reilly book features Matz

ChrisH stumbled on an announcement for a new O’Reilly book “Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think”, which includes an essay by Matz.

Royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.

• South Florida Software Symposium - May 18 - 20, 2007

If you’re in Florida between the 18th and 20th of May you may well want to get yourself down to this event. Its a No Fluff Just Stuff event so expect plenty of cool talks.

• Google Summer of Code (please forward)

Pet Eyler announces that Ruby Central have again been selected as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code.

The deadline for student proposals is March 24. “If you’re interested, the time to act is now!” A list of ideas has been put up on rubycentral.org.

“If you’re still interested in mentoring, but haven’t contacted me yet, please do.”

In another thread, KDE Ruby SOC projects, Richard Dale says the KDE project was also selected as a mentoring organisation, and there is already one Ruby-related KDE proposal.

Richard listed some possible projects that he hopes students will consider, including “Interactive visual irb. Like a Smalltalk environment I think ruby projects should be developed against an always running program.”

• North Bay Ruby Users Group March Meeting (Sebastopol, CA)

Rob Orsini presented “Exploring Ruport” at this month’s North Bay (California) Ruby User Group meeting.

• London Ruby User Group - 12th March, 2007

The London Ruby User Group had a “code review” meeting, where members submitted their code for discussion.

• Phoenix Ruby Users Group March Meeting

JRuby and RSpec were the topics of discussion in March’s Phoenix RUG meeting.

• Milwaukee RUG Meeting - This Wednesday 3/14/07 @ 5:30-7:30

The agenda for this week’s Milwaukee RUG meeting was “Leveraging CruiseControl for Continuous Integration”, “Continuous Integration for Rails”, by Tom Jordan.

Who's maintaining log4r?

This thread kicked off with the Jeff having made some patches for Log4r but finding himself unable to submit them to the project maintainer.

Tom Copeland (admin of Rubyforge) weighed in and conferred with the chaps at Ruby Central about what to do with unmaintained projects.

Various suggestions were offered including forcibly adding maintainers to a project and forking new projects from the existing codebase. The rubyforge guys decided they prefered forking to fiddling with existing projects.

Eventaully the original maintainer came forward so hopefully this important project will soon be getting some cool new features.

shutting irb up

A top tip started this short thread. For those moments when you want irb to be that little bit extra terse simply follow the instructions herein.

Ruby and Mobile

SunRaySon asks if it is possible to develop Ruby applications for mobile phones.

Justin Collins and Zouplaz point out the WinCE and Symbian ports of Ruby. WAP and SMS technologies can also be used.

QTRuby + QT4 + Win32

“I would like to use the fantastic QT4 for Win32 using the Qtruby bindings”, writes Uma Geller. Has anyone managed to compile this on Windows?

Hans Fugal links to a recent thread in the QtRuby forums where a poster explains how he’s successfully done this.

Also in that thread, Richard Dale says that a qt4-ruby-mswin32 binary gem is a “top priority” for the next QtRuby release, which will make life much easier.

What graphical frontend for a simple 2D game?

ChrisKaelin “just started for fun a little project creating an rpg-like game (you know, dwarves, elves’n’stuff)”, and decided it was time to put a graphical interface on it. What game or graphics libraries should he use?

The best option is Rubygame, followed by Ruby/SDL, replies Steven Davidovitz. RUDL is also available, however it is “fairly old and outdated with the last release in 2004”.

Editor: You can also use a non-game-oriented graphical toolkit that has Ruby bindings, like Tk, Fox, wxWidgets, GTK+/GNOME, or Qt/KDE. RAA lists some Ruby games as well.

JRuby rails-integration release announcement

This project aims to make deployment of Ruby projects into WARs possible. It looks like a cool project so give it a shot.

RSS Parser 0.1.7

Kouhei Sutou announced the latest release of RSS parser. Note the Atom and Dublin core godness included in this release.

One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.6-25

Curt Hibbs released a new version of the One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows. The only change is the upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6.

ruby-semacode-0.7.3

A new release of Ruby Semacode is out. If you’re wondering what a semacode is check out http://www.semacode.org.

Ruby-HL7 0.1.23

The latest release of HL7 parsing and generation library has been announced by Mark Guzman. Despite the version number this is apparently the first public release so props to Mark :)

Ruby 1.8.6 has been released

Akinori MUSHA: “I am pleased to announce that Ruby 1.8.6, the latest release from the 1.8 stable branch, has finally been released.”

This version of Ruby is a steady and reasonable enhancement of the 1.8 series including many bug and security fixes, standard library updates, feature enhancements and performance improvements keeping high backward compatibility with the previous release (1.8.5).