8th - 14th July 2007

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 and Krishna Sankar

This we had ~1300 messages !

Articles and Announcements

Quote of the Week

    I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn’t know it would be called Ruby —Kent Beck (as quoted in Robert’s signature)

Threads

Real project -- general application structure

Ricardo is working on a sensor project, to collect status from sensors and to dynamically update a web page. The basic question is how can two application talk together other than thru a database. Discussions cover ideas from RRDTool to EventMachine to Mongrel.

Technology solutions for Ruby?

Slightly long e-mail chain (~50 messages) on suitability of Ruby for a project that requires GUI, database and binary executable.

I need serious help!

This started a big thread (~270 messages and counting …) on suitability of Ruby for MMPROG games and degenerated into a general programming/language topic.

Efficient regular expression

The discussion started with the question string = “root 14051 14033 3 08:39 pts/2 00:00:00 /bin/bash” i need to fetch 14051 and /bin/bash from the string The discussion ~27 messages long and has interesting performance – profile/time – results from 5 methods to do it.

Spin buffers

Quick discussion on the spin buffer algorithm from Dr.Dobb’s journal

Abstract methods in ruby ?

Ascii art generator

Hadley was looking for an ASCII art generator – “you could give it a body of text, and a set of letters, and it would arrange the text to make the shape of the letters (ie. the big letters were made up of small words)”

Method to prevent writing over a file

Trying to get dynamic output in console

Printing at the same spot in console Michal had an interesting question: ho to print in the console at the same spot (for example : “Progress: 51% – I want this number to change and stay in the same spot”) It was solved with suggestions from the group

Method to prevent writing over a file

Which Hash methods are thread safe?

Covers thread synchronization as well as couple of ideas on pub-sub mechanisms using Ruby

Beautiful Code : Pity he didn't ask here...

John started writing about the article in O’Reilly book “Beautiful Code” and sample chapter by Tim Bray on Ruby. This was one of those long e-mail chains with ~50 responses, all very constructive. A good read on Ruby programming practices. If there is one chain you want to read, this should be it !

Rubys License

A quick discussion on whether Ruby licensing is under GPLv2 or v3 or something else and why it is not listed in OSI web site

Repacking an array of arrays

Kaps Lok was looking for packing arrays 3 arrays each with 5 elements, to five arrays of 3 elements each.

New Releases

god 0.1.0 released

god is a server side monitoring framework This is a log discussion generating ~40 responses, as one can imagine, mainly around the name

TestGen4Ruby (tg4rb) 0.0.2 Released

Google summer of code from Helder.

TestGen4Ruby takes the files from TestGen4Web (Firefox extension that records user action on a webpage and records them into an XML file) and translates those actions into executable code that uses the library FireWatir. One use could be test automation where the captured user actions can be played.