Ruby Weekly News

Ruby Weekly News: 09/22/2002

A summary of activity on the ruby-talk mailing list, brought to you
this week by Pat Eyler.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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Additional FXRuby installer for Ruby 1.7.3
A new installer for the windows version of Ruby 1.7.3. This
fixes the problem that existed the problem with using Ruby
threads with FXRuby.

ANN: RJudy-0.1 - Judy Arrays for Ruby
RJudy is an extension module providing an interface to the Judy
arrays library. The announcement of this module set off a
torrent of discussion and coding, with the author of Judy
putting in an appearance to discuss Judy, Ruby Hashes, and
possible improvements.

Ruby/Tk Widget Demos at new home
Matt Gushee has announced a new home for the Ruby/Tk demos, and
for the ongoing developement of Ruby/Tk. He will be taking over
maintainership from Jonathan Conway, and will be working with
him for a while to ensure consistency. Matt says that his
initial emphasis will be on bug squashing and documentation.
Feedback from the Ruby community is requested.

GridFlow 0.6.1
0.6.1 is a new release of GridFlow (a multi-dimensional
dataflow processing library for Ruby and jMax, specialized in
pictures and video)

Ruby-GNOME-0.30 is out!
Ruby-GNOME and Ruby-GTK 0.30 have been released. This release
adds support for Ruby/Libart and are wrappers of the GNOME 1.X
and GTK 1.2.X releases.

YAML.rb 0.40 – Circular references, Emitter enhancements
YAML is a structured data format. You may have used Wiki? Well,
Wiki is a powerful alternative to HTML. In many ways, YAML is
an alternative to XML. You can represent almost any Ruby object
in YAML.

ZenWeb 2.13.1 Released! (major bugfix!)
ZenWeb 2.13.1 has been released!

      This fixed a big bug in the previous release that slipped (and
      still slips) through my tests. It was a race condition that
      causes the real content to be empty... you wind up with very
      nicely rendered webpages but with no content. Ugh.

      Ryan has also added a new variable "charset" so you can render
      UTF-8 (or whatever) pages.

RDE 0.9.7.0 released
RDE is the development environment for Ruby on windows.

RubyCocoa 0.2.7
RubyCocoa is a combination Mac OS X framework and Ruby library
for using Cocoa Objects on MacOS X in Ruby scripts.

FreeRIDE
FreeRIDE is an IDE being designed for the Ruby language.

Ruby Conference 2002 registration now open!
Need I say more? Go and sign up! Now! (When you’re done, you
can come back and read the rest of this.)

INTERESTING THREADS

another german book is coming
A third german title is due to be published in September, ‘Ruby
DAS EINSTEIGERSEMINAR’. This thread breifly discussed Ruby
books available in other languages.

Best GC for Ruby?
Justin Johnson started a discussion of GC in Ruby with a
desciption of the work he’s currently doing. Matz chiimed in
giving us a (small) glimpse of GC in Rite.

Can We Pass Block from Function to Function?
William Tjokroaminata asked about passing a block from one
function to another, several people answered. The thread went
on to discuss block, procs, and methods. A pretty good read.

Getting list of classes in a module?
Philip Mak asked about finding the classes defined in a module.
Several responses ensued. Philip ended up with

      def classes_under(mod)

      mod.constants.select{|v| mod.const_get(v).type == Class}

      end

ICFP Programming Contest
Alan Chen asked about forming a team to work on the ICFP
Programming Contest. A small crowd gathered to watch and pitch
in. Conversation moved to the wiki.

Ruby Based App Server
Jason Underdown asked if a Ruby based App Server might be a
good idea. Pointers were given to IOWA, WEBrick, Ocelot, and
ONI. There was also some debate about the value of cloning
existing tools written with other languages in mind.

Ruby developers: help push RPKG development and usage forward!!
Many people jumped in a thread about the need for a CPAN like
solution for Ruby. RPKG was put forward as a possible solution,
and generated an huge thread. It makes for an interesting read.

Ruby jobs
Phlip started a conversation about the viability of Ruby as a
professional pursuit. The bad news is that there’s not much of
a market (yet). The good news is that there is a market, and
people are getting paid for doing cool stuff with Ruby.