Ruby Weekly News

ruby-talk
1

Ruby Weekly News: 04/14/2003

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS

···

=============

Text::Format v0.63
Austin Zeigler released v0.63 of Text::Format, which provides
strong text formatting capabilities to Ruby. Based on Perl’s
Text::Format 0.52, it offers all of the functionality of that
module as well as new capabilities. This version is a bugfix
release. Get Text::Format([1]).

ri for Ruby 1.8
Dave Thomas released a very preliminary version of ‘ri’ for
Ruby 1.8. This release includes documentation on two new
built-in classes and a new built-in module. It also includes
roughly 130 new or significantly modified methods.

      Dave has started a wiki page([2]) to collect feedback for the
      release. Download the new Ruby Interactive reference([3]).

DataVision v0.7.7
Jim Menard has released version 0.7.7 of DataVision, an Open
Source reporting tool similar to Crystal Reports. Reports can
be designed using a drag-and-drop GUI, printed, or exported in
a variety of formats.

      DataVision is written in Java but uses Ruby as its scripting
      language. Check out DataVision([4]).

RFC 2047
Sam Roberts has made the initial release of his RFC 2047
decoding library. RFC 2047([5]), , describes how to use
non-ascii character sets in internet mail. This library allows
you to convert a string that may include RFC 2047 encoded
characters to a given character set using iconv.

      Get it directly from the ruby-talk post([6]).

FreeRIDE v0.5.0 RC2
Curt Hibbs announced FreeRIDE v0.5.0 Release Candidate 2,
available from the FreeRIDE website([7]). FreeRIDE aims to be a
full-featured, first-class IDE on a par with those available
for other languages, with all the best-of-breed features that
you would expect in a high-end IDE

      In its current state, FreeRIDE cannot yet be called a real IDE.
      What it does have is a stable infrastructure with all the
      working plumbing needed for the hordes of anxious Ruby
      developers that want to create plugins to extend the
      functionality of FreeRIDE. The FreeRIDE team will be working on
      such FreeRIDE plugins that we will individually release to
      incrementally improve the FreeRIDE system. Support FreeRIDE by
      getting it([8]) and coding those plugins!

INTERESTING THREADS

Call for standardised package installation procedure
As Ruby gains in popularity, the community has become more and
more concerned with standardization, especially with regard to
library packaging. This thread rehashes the subject, bringing
several valid points to bear.

Array Subtraction
In this thread started by Jim Freeze, a change of behavior on
the part of Array#- in Ruby 1.8.0 is exposed and explained.

References

  1. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=text-format
  2. http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RIOnePointEight
  3. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=42128
  4. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=33343
  5. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2047.txt
  6. http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/69323
  7. http://www.rubyide.org/
  8. http://www.rubyide.org/