Here is the Ruby Weekly News for the past week.
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-10-25
Ruby Weekly News 25-31st October 2004
A summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the
comp.lang.ruby newsgroup. There were [890 messages in 176 threads]. This
summary is brought to you by Tim Sutherland.
Announcements
* [Nitro Web Engine 0.2.0]
George Moschovitis announced a new version of his web application
framework. The rdoc documentation has been greatly improved and a
test suite has been added. In the thread following the
announcement, he explains how [Nitro] differs from [Rails] - Nitro
focuses more on scalability and allowing the web developer to
choose the application design.
* [Ruvi 0.4.12]
Alexander Kellett released version 0.4.12 of [ruvi], the VIM-clone
written in Ruby, having distributed the pre-release last week. The
code has been refactored for improved stability and
scrolling/highlighting is faster.
* [New RCRchive is open]
David A. Black announced the opening of the new [RCRchive]. It has
been re-written in [Rails]. This follows last week's revelation of
a new [RubyGarden FAQ], also re-written in Rails by David. RCR
stands for "Ruby Change Request" and is the process by which users
can suggest changes to the Ruby language and standard libraries.
* [New RubyGarden article: "Reflections on Rails"]
Chad Fowler pointed out an [article on RubyGarden] by David A.
Black which discusses his experiences with developing sites in
[Rails]. Chad writes "I hope this to be the first in a long stream
of articles, tutorials, and interviews to grace the pages of
RubyGarden.org." Please contact him if you wish to contribute.
* [Earlybird entries are about to close for OSDC]
Graeme Cross noted that registrations for the Australian Open
Source Developers' Conference are now open. This conference will
run 1st - 3rd of December 2004 at Monash University.
* [SQLite/Ruby 2.2.0]
Jamis Buck released a new version of [SQLite/Ruby], a Ruby
interface for the [SQLite] database engine. Statement#execute now
accepts bind values as arguments. The thread also discussed
supporting version 3 of SQLite (currently beta). Jamis intends to
write a binding for it when the API settles down.
* [Needle 0.9.0]
Jamis Buck updated [Needle] a dependency injection (and service
locator) container for Ruby. It has some small API changes and the
log output is more readable. He has scheduled version 1.0 for
November 4th, so contact him before then to report bugs or missing
features.
* [Matz's baby!]
Jamis Buck was reading [Matz' blog] and saw that Matz now has a
baby girl. Matz reports that both the mother and child are
healthy. Congratulations!
* [Wee goes public]
Michael Neumann announced the first public release of [Wee]. It is
a web application framework incorporating features from Seaside2,
Iowa and Borges.
* [Design by Contract for C]
Charles Mills released [Design by Contract for C], a C
pre-processor that generates contract testing code and
documentation from DBC tags embedded in C comments.
* [RubyGarden: GCAndExtensions]
Tim Sutherland wrote a replacement for the GCAndExtensions page on
RubyGarden. This page is for people who write C extensions for
Ruby, or embed Ruby in other programs. It tells you what you need
to know about Ruby's garbage collector in these situations. For
example, it explains when volatile may be necessary.
* [win32-eventlog 0.3.0], [win32-ipc 0.3.0]
On behalf of the [Win32Utils] Team, Daniel Berger announced a new
version of win32-eventlog, a Ruby interface for the Windows Event
Log. You can now put a "watch" on the log to have a block called
whenever a new record is added. There were some other API
improvements and a bug was fixed. He also announced win32-ipc
0.3.0. This is a base class for Win32 synchronization objects. The
constructor and wait methods now take blocks and the library
raises an exception rather than returning nil when errors occur.
Threads
Interesting threads this week include ...
[Compiling Extensions on Windows], [How to build Ruby on Windows]
Jim Weirich asked about building C extensions on Windows. Various people
pointed out that Microsoft now provide the command-line tools for Visual
Studio .NET 2003 for no cost ([FreeVisualStudio]). [MinGW] (Minimalist GNU
For Windows) was also listed as a solution (this uses the GNU C compiler
and is link-compatible with Visual Studio).
A couple of days later Matt Mower published a guide HowToBuildOnWindows
for building Ruby with MinGW on Windows.
[Re: eRuby for Windows], [Questions About Documenting erb.rb]
The first thread started a couple of weeks ago and has turned into a
discussion on writing documentation for those standard Ruby libraries
which are still lacking in that area. Gavin Sinclair gave some advice for
people interested helping out, mentioning the ruby-doc mailing list and
listing himself as a person to send patches to.
[Garden Spam], [RubyGarden wiki patch], [Flea vs RubyGarden]
The problem of how to reduce the problem of scripts spamming the
RubyGarden Wiki was discussed, with many people throwing in their 2 cents.
[CAPTCHA] tests were a popular idea, these are tests that humans can pass
but computer programs can't (easily). An example given by Gabriele Renzi
is the question "what colour is a white horse?"
Chad Fowler implemented a simple change to RubyGarden that only allows
URLs with a capitalised protocol://. It is hoped this will have an effect
for a while since it appears the spammers are not specifically targeting
RubyGarden but spamming sites automatically.
[Name Dropping], [Ruby on Rails presentation added to the WhyRuby repository]
Curt Hibbs was preparing a presentation on [Ruby on Rails] for Java
developers and wanted to "mention the names of a few well known (in our
industry) people who are also Ruby enthusiasts." Ron Jeffries and Martin
Fowler from the agile software development community were among the names
mentioned.
He later put the [presentation slides] on the web and reported that the
talk was very well received.
[Ruby & Oracle 10g]
Anders Engstro:m asked about connecting to an Oracle 10g database with
Ruby. Ollivier Robert reported that the dbd_oci8 distributed with DBI has
no problem using version 10g.
[[QUIZ] Sokoban (#5)], [Re: [QUIZ] Sokoban (#5) -- Games in Ruby]
[Ruby Quiz] number 5 was posted by James Edward Gray II.
"Ruby isn't the only good thing to come out of Japan. The computer game
Sokoban, invented by Hiroyuki Imabayashi, was introduced by Thinking Rabbit
of Takarazuka, Japan in 1982. This simple game of logic puzzles was an
instant success. It won awards and spawned sequels. Over the years, Sokoban
has been ported to a huge number of platforms. Fan support remains strong
and many of those fans even produce new levels for the game.
This week's quiz is to implement the game of Sokoban with the interface of
your choosing and any extra features you would like to have."
[Auto-completion editor/IDE]
Eli Tucker asked if there are any IDEs that support auto-completion for
Ruby. He'd used [RDE] but found the auto-completion limited. The inherent
difficulties of doing this in Ruby were pointed out and "Rob" mentioned
his jEdit macro which is based on the idea "if it quacks like a duck, it
probably waddles like a duck too".
"The jEdit beanshell macro executes a Ruby script that does the following:
1) determines methods that have already been called on the variable
2) uses a slightly modified version of ri to find classes that have all
those methods
3) uses ri again to find all the methods available on those classes
The jEdit macro then displays a popup list of the methods for the user to
select from. In the case of a variable being declared like this:
variable = Duck.new
we know we have a duck so the script can immediately jump to step 3."
[ruby-dev summary 24487-24627]
Minero Aoki posted the summary of the (Japanese) ruby-dev mailing list.
He reports that it looks like 1.8.2 preview 3 will be out soon.
[Lint for Ruby]
Matt Mower asked if there was a "Lint" program for Ruby to check for
errors in code. One of Robert Feldt's students, Philippa Olofsson, wrote a
thesis on the topic of static checking in Ruby: [CheckR] and there was
some discussion of the ideas therein.
