Ruby Weekly News

Ruby Weekly News: 07/08/2002

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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Vim-Remote for Ruby
Ned Konz has made a library for remote controlling ViM. This
library should allow people to make nice additions to ViM such
as a debugger that can use ViM for IO and display. Get
Vim-Remote([1]).

Sys::ProcTable 0.1.0
Daniel Berger has written a C extension that is similar to the
ps command on unix systems. This module allows one to view
process table infomration, such as pid, euid, state, etc. Get
Sys::ProcTable([2]).

RubyConf.new(2002)
David Alan Black has sent a post as a “call for papers”. The
conference isn’t till November. Conference organizers would
like to have all submissions no later then August 15th. At this
stage all that is required to submit is the abstract, not the
whole paper in its grand entirity. Make your RubyConf proposal
here([3]).

Archive 0.2
Massimiliano Mirra has announced a framework for reading,
modifying and writing archive and archive-like files through a
uniform interface. Get Archive([4]).

FXIrb
Gilles Filippini has written an FXRuby widget that is intended
to embed an IRB session within it. Get FXIrb([5]).

INTERESTING THREADS

Ruby Documentation
Sean Chittenden has initiated a project aimed at being a single
source for any Ruby documentation contributed by the community.
You will find lots of information on topics such as mod_ruby,
databases, XML, embedding and much much more. This project
requires input from the community, if anyone would like to help
document anything about Ruby, get in touch with Sean
Chittenden([6]). Note, this project is a work in progress and
will prove to be an excellent resource as the community
documents their technical expertise in one easy to read and
find location. Goto rubydoc([7]).

Move over shell script
Some people have asked if Ruby can replace the regular day to
day usage of your shell scripting tasks. The general answer is
"yes". David Douthitt asked if he could do away with ksh and
use Ruby instead. Read more for peoples opinions.

Package protected methods
Matthias Veit has asked if there is such a thing as “package
level protection”. The current answer is no, but others agree
that this would be useful, both for test harnesses to take
advantage of and application code.

Ruby 1.7 for Windows
Andrew Hunt has announced his itentions of soon releasing a 1.7
build for the windows platform. Andy has been known for his
work on Ruby Win32 which is entirely independent of Cygwin.
Keep an eye on Andys work([8]).

Ruby Logos
If you are looking for Ruby logos, Sean Chittenden has a page
with many of them on his personal site. Get Ruby logos
here([9]).

ri from irb
Joel VanderWerf wrote in a very nice irb type. Apparently it is
very easy to execute ri from within irb through the irbrc file.
See his post for more details.

[Pre-RCR] nil.empty?
Dave Thomas has posted the question of should the Nil class
respond to a empty? message? The general opinion from the
community is very mixed with many different issues are
surfacing. A fascinating thread to track.

References

  1. http://bike-nomad.com/ruby/
  2. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=Sys%2FProcTable
  3. http://www.rubyconf.org/proposal.php
  4. http://www.allruby.com/rpkg/archive-0.1.tar.gz
  5. http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?FXIrb
  6. http://www.rubydoc.org/book/x2265.htm#AEN2274
  7. http://rubydoc.org/book/book1.htm
  8. http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ruby-install.html
  9. http://sean.chittenden.org/img/ruby/