http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20050522.html
Ruby Weekly News 16th - 22nd May 2005
···
-------------------------------------
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by
Tim Sutherland.
Articles and Announcements
--------------------------
One-Click Ruby Installer hits 90k
---------------------------------
Curt Hibbs announced that the One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows has
been downloaded over 90,000 times since moving to RubyForge in April
2004.
60,000 of those downloads were in the last four months.
In other One-Click Ruby Installer news, Mark Hubbart has been working
on a MacOS X version. Curt is also looking for people to begin
One-Click installers for KDE and GNOME.
``I've been pushing Ruby since the Fall of 2001, and it is wonderful to
finally see Ruby start to take off. It's been very gratifying to have
played a small part in helping Ruby push into the mainstream.''
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, Chapter Six: Downtown
-----------------------------------------------------
``Chapter Six, "Downtown," rejoins the friendly foxes, the tall and
the short, on their misadventures to locate their lost pickup truck.
As always: much code. And now with syntax highlighting, less red.
I am extremely proud of the metaprogramming section. I hope it will
aid you on Square One.''
Ruby User Groups
----------------
Hamburg.rb
----------
Stephan Kämper announced that Hamburg.rb are meeting on June 1st,
2005. The location is Stresemannstrasse 144, Hamburg, Germany.
New Sydney Ruby Users Google Group
----------------------------------
Harry Ohlsen provided a link to the newly setup Sydney-Ruby-Users
Google Groups mailing list.
Quote of the Week
-----------------
"Ruby smile" by baalbek:
``Mostly for the newbies who stumbles into this NG, wondering what Ruby is
all about...
Well, Ruby is the digital equivalent of a big smile!
The more I learn about Ruby (modules import, the ease of extending it in
C/C++, closures, tight but readable syntax, everything works like one
expects, etc etc etc), the bigger the smile on my face when coding...''
Threads
-------
Interesting threads included:
join not in Enumerable
----------------------
Logan Capaldo noticed that Enumerable#join doesn't exist.
``I said to my self, self there is no reason that has to be Array only
functionality. Why isn't it in Enumerable?''
Ara.T.Howard gave one reason; ``just because somthing is countable
(Enumerable) doesn't mean each sub-thing is singular.'' For example, each
iteration over a Hash gives a [key, value]. He continued, ``this is no
stubling block (pun intended) for ruby however'', and posted a version of
Enumerable#join that takes a block. An example of its use:
h = { 1 => 'one', 2 => 'two', 3 => 'three' }
s = h.join('; ') { |kv| kv.join(' -> ') }
puts(s) # outputs "1 -> 'one'; 2 -> 'two'; 3 -> 'three'"
nobu said it ``Feels interesting'' and gave a patch to enum.c implementing
Ara's version.
Not all Enumerables have a well-defined ordering. (For example Hash.)
Whether this mattered or not was debated.
Nearby, Eric Mahurin argued that there are many other Array methods that
should be added to Enumerable, +, size, uniq to list just a few.
David A. Black wasn't so sure about all of these. size for instance may
not be suitable for all Enumerables - ``partly because some of them have no
particular size and partly because even for those that do, taking the size
might cause side-effects (e.g., an I/O-based enumerable)''.
Eric Mahurin said that this was true, however it is also true for existing
methods in Enumerable. ``Using any enumerable method with IO has the same
issue. You'll need to seek back between calls to any of the enumerable
methods on an IO.''
David posted
class C
include Enumerable
def each
loop { yield rand(100) }
end
end
as an example of a class for which size is meaningless.
On the other hand, Eric pointed out Enumerable#sort isn't useful on that
class either.
Uniform vector class, inheriting from Array:
How to make sure that methods return a Vector and not an Array?
---------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas implemented a "Vector" class, designed to act like Array but only
allow items of the same "type".
He inherited from Array and over-rode a few methods like []= and << to
validate the elements as they were added.
This worked, however Array#+ would always return an Array, not a Vector.
He could write Vector#+ to wrap around it, but is there a simpler way?
Brian Schröder didn't think the Vector class was a good idea, however he
suggested forwarding to the Array instead of inheriting from it.
gabriele renzi added ``this makes me think: the delegation approach is
usually simpler. But is this because of an underlying fault of the
inheritance mechanic or is it the obvious more simple thing?''
(Part of the problem is that methods like Array#+ "cheat" in order to be
more efficient by avoiding calling a Ruby method on each element that is
added.)
Tiling Turmoil (#33)
--------------------
Greg Brown wrote this week's Ruby Quiz. The problem is to write a program
that will help Greg cover his bathroom floor with L-shaped tiles. (Well,
almost.)
Doing fixups after deserializing YAML
-------------------------------------
Matthew Westcott, ``for reasons best known to myself'', wanted more control
over the way YAML de-serialised his objects. In particular, he wanted to be
able to automatically modify the objects after de-serialisation.
He later found the YAML.add_domain_type method which allows you to do
this.
how calculate md4 hash?
-----------------------
Dave asked how he could calculate an MD4 hash. The openssl library looked
promising, but he hadn't found a code sample for generating an MD4.
WATANABE Hirofumi:
ruby -ropenssl -e 'puts OpenSSL::Digest::MD4.hexdigest("foo")'
Ruby/TK on Mac OS X Tiger?
--------------------------
Tom Nakamura asked if require 'tk' works by default on MacOS X Tiger.
Mark Hubbart: ``Yes! Imagine my surprise :)''
Philipp Kern added that it looks ``really nice'' because it uses native
widgets where possible, so your Tk apps are Aquafied.
New Releases
------------
* RMagick 1.8.1
Timothy Hunter made a bug-fix release of his bindings to the
ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick image processing libraries.
* HighLine 0.6.0-Now with menus!
James Edward Gray II announced that the ``latest version of HighLine
comes with two massive new features. The first is the new HighLine
Developer, Greg Brown.''
The second feature was a menuing system created by Greg Brown.
HighLine is a library that eases the task of doing console input and
output.
* Ruby Facets 0.7.2
Trans posted a ``ballistic'' release of Ruby Facets,
``a cornicopia of extensions and additions for the
Ruby programming language.''
Carats has now been merged into Facets, adding in its classes, modules
and mixins to the methods Facets had before.
Other improvements include support for automatically loading methods
when you first try to use them.
* soap4r/1.5.4
NAKAMURA, Hiroshi announced an update to soap4r, the standard Ruby
library for dealing with SOAP web services. (Both client and server.)
WSDL support was improved, along with .NET interoperability.
* AllInOneRuby 0.2.2
Erik Veenstra announced the latest version of his ``just-in-time and
temporary installation of Ruby'' - a single compressed executable for
Windows, Linux or MacOS X that includes a full Ruby runtime and
libraries.
* cursor-0.5
Eric Mahurin released cursor 0.5, a library that provides powerful
external iterator features - ``insert, delete, replace, copy, paste,
move'' etc. (similar to the operations supported by text editors, but
not limited to Strings).
* Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit 0.6.7
Rob improved the Ruby Editor Plugin for the jEdit editor. Method
completion is more clever when adding parentheses. Indenting also now
works better.
* RubyScript2Exe 0.3.4
Erik Veenstra released the latest RubyScript2Exe, a tool for
transforming your Ruby program into a standalone compressed Windows,
Linux or MacOS X executable containing your code as well as the Ruby
interpreter and other libraries.
* ParseTree 1.3.6
Ryan Davis ferreted out a new ParseTree release. ParseTree extracts
the abstract syntax tree from Ruby classes or methods, returning it as
an s-expression using Arrays, Strings, Symbols and Integers.
* icalc 0.0.4
Dr Balwinder S Dheeman released a ``versatile tool for network/system
administrators'' Given an IP address (or prefix, or range, or with
netmask...), it calculates such things as the broadcast address and
class.
* Rebbin 0.7
Lawrence Oluyede updated Rebbin, a "pastebin" written in Rails. It
allows people to upload snippets of text (e.g. source code) for public
viewing.
RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds were added, as well as XML-RPC and SOAP
support. A scheduler is now available to remove snippets older than 48
hours.
* RubyInline 3.3.2 Released
Ryan Davis lined up RubyInline 3.3.2, a library allowing you to embed
C and C++ code directly in your Ruby source files. ``The code is
compiled and run on the fly when needed.''
It also has a tool package_inline to allow you to use RubyInline'd
code on systems which lack a C compiler.
* Fireruby 0.3.0
Peter Wood's FireRuby extension was updated. This is a library for use
with the Firebird RDBMS.
``Once again I would like to thank Ken Kunz for his support and input
to the FireRuby project. Ken performs the unit testing and creates the
gem file for the Linux version of the FireRuby library.''
The API was improved in a number of ways.
* Syck 0.55-Object loading, memory leaks
why the lucky stiff fixed some memory leaks and parse errors in Syck,
the YAML library for Ruby. (YAML is a humane markup language.)
Support for your own yaml_initialize and yaml_new methods was added.
``I'd say typing is done at this point.''
* Amrita2 1.9.5
With this release of Amrita2, Taku Nakajima says the main features now
work, and it is ready for ``evaluation use'' He also posted the
roadmap.
Amrita2 is an XHTML/XML template library, the successor to Amrita
(surprise!)
* Reg 0.4.5
Caleb Clausen released a new version of Reg, a tool for pattern
matching in arbitrary Ruby object graphs.
It provides matchers for Strings, Arrays, Symbols, Hashes, and several
generic options for other Objects.
* Rant 0.3.8
Stefan Lang added some new features to Rant, a flexible build tool
written in Ruby.
Dependency checking for C and C++ source code is now supported, as is
functionality for installing .cmd files on Windows.
* ruby-services 0.1.0
On behalf of the Win32 Utils team, Daniel Berger announced the first
release of ruby-services.
This will be a collection of various programs presented as Win32
services. (Currently a WEBrick HTTPServer is the only program
included.)
* pscan 0.0.2
Dr Balwinder S Dheeman released pscan, a simple TCP/IP port scanner
written in Ruby.
* Nitro + Og 0.17.0, Og Reloaded, Elements
George Moschovitis came out with the ``biggest release yet'' of Nitro
and Og. (Nitro is a web application framework and Og an
object-relational mapper.)
There are many many (many) new features. (Seriously, lots.)