T
Tim Sutherland
Links are at http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070318.html
Ruby Weekly News 12th - 18th March 2007
=======================================
Ruby Weekly News takes a look at the week's discussions on the ruby-talk
mailing list (and its equivalents, the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and Ruby
forum).
This edition is brought to you by Tim Sutherland and Robert Postill.
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* New O'Reilly book features Matz
---------------------------------
ChrisH stumbled on an announcement for a new O'Reilly book "Beautiful
Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think", which includes an
essay by Matz.
Royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.
* South Florida Software Symposium - May 18 - 20, 2007
------------------------------------------------------
If you're in Florida between the 18th and 20th of May you may well
want to get yourself down to this event. Its a No Fluff Just Stuff
event so expect plenty of cool talks.
* Google Summer of Code (please forward)
----------------------------------------
Pet Eyler announces that Ruby Central have again been selected as a
mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code.
The deadline for student proposals is March 24.
"If you're interested, the time to act is now!"
A list of ideas has been put up on rubycentral.org.
"If you're still interested in mentoring, but haven't contacted me
yet, please do."
In another thread, 'KDE Ruby SOC projects', Richard Dale says the KDE
project was also selected as a mentoring organisation, and there is
already one Ruby-related KDE proposal.
Richard listed some possible projects that he hopes students will
consider, including "Interactive visual irb. Like a Smalltalk
environment I think ruby projects should be developed against an
always running program."
User Group News
===============
* North Bay Ruby Users Group March Meeting (Sebastopol, CA)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Rob Orsini presented "Exploring Ruport" at this month's North Bay
(California) Ruby User Group meeting.
* London Ruby User Group - 12th March, 2007
-------------------------------------------
The London Ruby User Group had a "code review" meeting, where members
submitted their code for discussion.
* Phoenix Ruby Users Group March Meeting
----------------------------------------
JRuby and RSpec were the topics of discussion in March's Phoenix RUG
meeting.
* Milwaukee RUG Meeting - This Wednesday 3/14/07 @ 5:30-7:30
------------------------------------------------------------
The agenda for this week's Milwaukee RUG meeting was "Leveraging
CruiseControl for Continuous Integration", "Continuous Integration for
Rails", by Tom Jordan.
Threads
=======
Who's maintaining log4r?
------------------------
This thread kicked off with the Jeff having made some patches for Log4r
but finding himself unable to submit them to the project maintainer.
Tom Copeland (admin of Rubyforge) weighed in and conferred with the chaps
at Ruby Central about what to do with unmaintained projects.
Various suggestions were offered including forcibly adding maintainers to
a project and forking new projects from the existing codebase. The
rubyforge guys decided they prefered forking to fiddling with existing
projects.
Eventaully the original maintainer came forward so hopefully this
important project will soon be getting some cool new features.
shutting irb up
---------------
A top tip started this short thread. For those moments when you want irb
to be that little bit extra terse simply follow the instructions herein.
Ruby and Mobile
---------------
SunRaySon asks if it is possible to develop Ruby applications for mobile
phones.
Justin Collins and Zouplaz point out the WinCE and Symbian ports of Ruby.
WAP and SMS technologies can also be used.
QTRuby + QT4 + Win32
--------------------
"I would like to use the fantastic QT4 for Win32 using the Qtruby
bindings", writes Uma Geller. Has anyone managed to compile this on
Windows?
Hans Fugal links to a recent thread in the QtRuby forums where a poster
explains how he's successfully done this.
Also in that thread, Richard Dale says that a qt4-ruby-mswin32 binary gem
is a "top priority" for the next QtRuby release, which will make life much
easier.
What graphical frontend for a simple 2D game?
---------------------------------------------
ChrisKaelin "just started for fun a little project creating an rpg-like
game (you know, dwarves, elves'n'stuff)", and decided it was time to put a
graphical interface on it. What game or graphics libraries should he use?
The best option is Rubygame, followed by Ruby/SDL, replies Steven
Davidovitz. RUDL is also available, however it is "fairly old and outdated
with the last release in 2004".
Editor: You can also use a non-game-oriented graphical toolkit that has
Ruby bindings, like Tk, Fox, wxWidgets, GTK+/GNOME, or Qt/KDE. RAA lists
some Ruby games as well.
New Releases
============
JRuby rails-integration release announcement
--------------------------------------------
This project aims to make deployment of Ruby projects into WARs possible.
It looks like a cool project so give it a shot.
RSS Parser 0.1.7
----------------
Kouhei Sutou announced the latest release of RSS parser. Note the Atom and
Dublin core godness included in this release.
One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.6-25
---------------------------------
Curt Hibbs released a new version of the One-Click Ruby Installer for
Windows. The only change is the upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6.
ruby-semacode-0.7.3
-------------------
A new release of Ruby Semacode is out. If you're wondering what a semacode
is check out http://www.semacode.org.
Ruby-HL7 0.1.23
---------------
The latest release of HL7 parsing and generation library has been
announced by Mark Guzman. Despite the version number this is apparently
the first public release so props to Mark
Ruby 1.8.6 has been released
----------------------------
Akinori MUSHA: "I am pleased to announce that Ruby 1.8.6, the latest
release from the 1.8 stable branch, has finally been released."
end
===
We hoped you enjoyed this edition of the Ruby Weekly News.
Anyone can contribute to the next newsletter - simply visit
http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next to summarise
one or more threads from the list. Thanks!
Ruby Weekly News 12th - 18th March 2007
=======================================
Ruby Weekly News takes a look at the week's discussions on the ruby-talk
mailing list (and its equivalents, the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and Ruby
forum).
This edition is brought to you by Tim Sutherland and Robert Postill.
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* New O'Reilly book features Matz
---------------------------------
ChrisH stumbled on an announcement for a new O'Reilly book "Beautiful
Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think", which includes an
essay by Matz.
Royalties from the book will be donated to Amnesty International.
* South Florida Software Symposium - May 18 - 20, 2007
------------------------------------------------------
If you're in Florida between the 18th and 20th of May you may well
want to get yourself down to this event. Its a No Fluff Just Stuff
event so expect plenty of cool talks.
* Google Summer of Code (please forward)
----------------------------------------
Pet Eyler announces that Ruby Central have again been selected as a
mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code.
The deadline for student proposals is March 24.
"If you're interested, the time to act is now!"
A list of ideas has been put up on rubycentral.org.
"If you're still interested in mentoring, but haven't contacted me
yet, please do."
In another thread, 'KDE Ruby SOC projects', Richard Dale says the KDE
project was also selected as a mentoring organisation, and there is
already one Ruby-related KDE proposal.
Richard listed some possible projects that he hopes students will
consider, including "Interactive visual irb. Like a Smalltalk
environment I think ruby projects should be developed against an
always running program."
User Group News
===============
* North Bay Ruby Users Group March Meeting (Sebastopol, CA)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Rob Orsini presented "Exploring Ruport" at this month's North Bay
(California) Ruby User Group meeting.
* London Ruby User Group - 12th March, 2007
-------------------------------------------
The London Ruby User Group had a "code review" meeting, where members
submitted their code for discussion.
* Phoenix Ruby Users Group March Meeting
----------------------------------------
JRuby and RSpec were the topics of discussion in March's Phoenix RUG
meeting.
* Milwaukee RUG Meeting - This Wednesday 3/14/07 @ 5:30-7:30
------------------------------------------------------------
The agenda for this week's Milwaukee RUG meeting was "Leveraging
CruiseControl for Continuous Integration", "Continuous Integration for
Rails", by Tom Jordan.
Threads
=======
Who's maintaining log4r?
------------------------
This thread kicked off with the Jeff having made some patches for Log4r
but finding himself unable to submit them to the project maintainer.
Tom Copeland (admin of Rubyforge) weighed in and conferred with the chaps
at Ruby Central about what to do with unmaintained projects.
Various suggestions were offered including forcibly adding maintainers to
a project and forking new projects from the existing codebase. The
rubyforge guys decided they prefered forking to fiddling with existing
projects.
Eventaully the original maintainer came forward so hopefully this
important project will soon be getting some cool new features.
shutting irb up
---------------
A top tip started this short thread. For those moments when you want irb
to be that little bit extra terse simply follow the instructions herein.
Ruby and Mobile
---------------
SunRaySon asks if it is possible to develop Ruby applications for mobile
phones.
Justin Collins and Zouplaz point out the WinCE and Symbian ports of Ruby.
WAP and SMS technologies can also be used.
QTRuby + QT4 + Win32
--------------------
"I would like to use the fantastic QT4 for Win32 using the Qtruby
bindings", writes Uma Geller. Has anyone managed to compile this on
Windows?
Hans Fugal links to a recent thread in the QtRuby forums where a poster
explains how he's successfully done this.
Also in that thread, Richard Dale says that a qt4-ruby-mswin32 binary gem
is a "top priority" for the next QtRuby release, which will make life much
easier.
What graphical frontend for a simple 2D game?
---------------------------------------------
ChrisKaelin "just started for fun a little project creating an rpg-like
game (you know, dwarves, elves'n'stuff)", and decided it was time to put a
graphical interface on it. What game or graphics libraries should he use?
The best option is Rubygame, followed by Ruby/SDL, replies Steven
Davidovitz. RUDL is also available, however it is "fairly old and outdated
with the last release in 2004".
Editor: You can also use a non-game-oriented graphical toolkit that has
Ruby bindings, like Tk, Fox, wxWidgets, GTK+/GNOME, or Qt/KDE. RAA lists
some Ruby games as well.
New Releases
============
JRuby rails-integration release announcement
--------------------------------------------
This project aims to make deployment of Ruby projects into WARs possible.
It looks like a cool project so give it a shot.
RSS Parser 0.1.7
----------------
Kouhei Sutou announced the latest release of RSS parser. Note the Atom and
Dublin core godness included in this release.
One-Click Ruby Installer 1.8.6-25
---------------------------------
Curt Hibbs released a new version of the One-Click Ruby Installer for
Windows. The only change is the upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6.
ruby-semacode-0.7.3
-------------------
A new release of Ruby Semacode is out. If you're wondering what a semacode
is check out http://www.semacode.org.
Ruby-HL7 0.1.23
---------------
The latest release of HL7 parsing and generation library has been
announced by Mark Guzman. Despite the version number this is apparently
the first public release so props to Mark
Ruby 1.8.6 has been released
----------------------------
Akinori MUSHA: "I am pleased to announce that Ruby 1.8.6, the latest
release from the 1.8 stable branch, has finally been released."
end
===
We hoped you enjoyed this edition of the Ruby Weekly News.
Anyone can contribute to the next newsletter - simply visit
http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/newsletters/contribute/next to summarise
one or more threads from the list. Thanks!