T
Tim Sutherland
http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20060806.html
Use the link above for a nicer version of this newsletter that's formatted
for the web, including links to threads and other sites. You can also
subscribe to a newsletter-only mailing list, or to RSS/Atom feeds.
Ruby Weekly News 31st July - 6th August 2006
============================================
Ruby Weekly News summarises some of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to you
by Tim Sutherland.
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* RuportDay2006: A day of fun, prizes, and reporting software!
--------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory Brown announced a 24-hour contest for "finding bugs, squashing
bugs, proposing API changes / feature additions, writing docs, etc."
for the Ruport reporting library. It will be held on the 13th of
August, and has prizes: US$100 cash for first place, $80 for second,
and $70 for third (sponsorship thanks to BTree Technology).
Gregory is working on Ruport as part of the Google Summer of Code.
* More info on RubyConf 2006 registration
-----------------------------------------
Registration for RubyConf 2006 opened on August 2nd, and sold out.
The conference is in Denver, Colorado, on October 20-22nd, and is run
by Ruby Central. Inc.
* New Ruby Culture T-Shirts!
----------------------------
Matt Todd designed a bunch of shirts expressing Ruby culture, with
Ruby code, quotes (especially from _why), Japanese animals etc.
In "Speaking of T-shirts...", Hal Fulton posted some of his own
designs, with a "Ruby geek" symbol based on ESR's idea of using the
floater from Conway's Game of Life.
You can buy Mark's shirts through Spreadshirt, and Hal's through
cafepress. There is also James Britt's RubyStuff.
* ICFP and OOPSLA in Portland, Oregon
-------------------------------------
"For those of you who didn't get in to RubyConf or who didn't attend
OSCON/FOSCON, there are a couple more opportunities to visit my home
town in the context of programming languages."
There's the International Conference on Functional Programming on
September 18-20, and OOPSLA on October 22-26 (Object-Oriented
Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications - an ACM SIGPLAN
International Conference).
User Group News
===============
* Ruby/Rails User Groups in Southern California
-----------------------------------------------
The Orange County Ruby Users Group have a formal meeting every fourth
Thursday, reported Scott Hodson. Every other Thursday they meet
informally at a place having free WiFi.
* SanDiego.rb Meeting Tomorrow, August 3rd
------------------------------------------
San Diego Rubyists had a meeting on August 3rd, said Kevin Clark.
"Chris Abad will be talking about experiences developing and deploying
out.landi.sh with Ruby on Rails. Jordan Fowler will be giving us a run
down on access control and acts_as_authenticated."
Quote of the Week
=================
* Bug or Feature?
-----------------
Tammo Freese: "I would expect that method calls and proc calls do not
differ in such a way. Is this a bug or a feature?"
Matz: "It's a feature, but we are trying to fix it in the next major
release (1.9 or 2.0)."
Link of the Week
================
* Summer of Rails
-----------------
Patrick Crowley's come up with a great way of motivating himself and
others to learn Rails and create useful applications.
Summer of Rails has been running for about a month, and finishes on
September 23rd. It already has links to 15 Rails sites that have been
created as a result of the project, and it has a fantastic logo
Threads
=======
Session support for SOAP client
-------------------------------
D.Kay wondered how to call a web service that has a `Login' method
returning a user_id that must then be passed to subsequent methods?
He'd got it to work with XMLRPC::Client, but how do you store session
cookies with SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory?
Hiroshi Nakamura explained that if you install http-access2 you can then
write
driver.options["protocol.http.cookie_store_file"] = "cookie.file"
humanized Xml tree navigation
-----------------------------
chiaro scuro asked if anyone knows a library that lets you access an XML
tree like "normal objects", e.g. people.person[2].name.
Hiroshi Nakamura posted some code using XSD::Mapping from the standard
library:
require 'xsd/mapping'
people = XSD::Mapping.xml2obj(File.read("people.xml"))
people.person[2].name # => "name3"
You can also write e.g. people['foo-bar'] to deal with tags that have
hyphens etc. obj2xml can convert an object tree into XML.
Ruby Cookbook
-------------
There were around 40 posts talking about the Ruby Cookbook (by Lucas
Carlson and Leonard Richardson, published by O'Reilly).
Much of the discussion was around the lack of an electronic version of the
book (e.g. PDF), but James Edward Gray II said:
extending ruby with ocaml
-------------------------
Ara.T.Howard highlighted ProjectIdeas/RubyOCaml from the SciRuby wiki, a
simple proof-of-concept of calling Objective Caml code from Ruby (using C
as an intermediate language).
"[T]his has seen the list before but, seeing all the interest in ocaml
recently i thought i'd post it again".
Ilmari Heikkinen recalled some discussion around adding OCaml support to
RubyInline, and asked "did anything come out of that?"
New Releases
============
There were many more releases this week than those listed below.
Check out the RubyForge main page for more release announcements.
Motiro 0.4.2
------------
Thiago Arrais released a new version of his software tracking system
(featuring a "Subversion front end, an event notification system and a
smallish wiki-like language for page edition with support for
translation"). It's similar to Trac.
"It has borrowed its name from an ancient tupy word meaning a work
gathering. Motiro is a time when people get together to collaborate on a
common goal such as harvesting food or building houses."
Nitro/Og 0.31.0
---------------
Gabriele Renzi announced Nitro 0.31. "The release is mostly due to the
great work of Bryan Soto at integrating patches from the community and to
the nicety of darcs"
Nitro is a web application framework, and Og is an object
persistence/mapping library.
There were discussions about the differences between Rails and Nitro.
(They've existed for roughly the same amount of time.)
JRuby Extras - making Ruby apps spectacular in the Java world
-------------------------------------------------------------
Charles O Nutter happily announced the "JRuby Extras" project.
"This project is intended to be a community-maintained nursery of plugins
and extensions to extend JRuby's capabilities and to provide Java-based
versions of many popular C extensions."
Projects so far include a `port' of Mongrel, an ActiveRecord JDBC adapter
and a set of Java-aware Rake tasks.
"Anyone interested in porting an extension to Java or making their
favorite Ruby app run under JRuby should join the project!"
Use the link above for a nicer version of this newsletter that's formatted
for the web, including links to threads and other sites. You can also
subscribe to a newsletter-only mailing list, or to RSS/Atom feeds.
Ruby Weekly News 31st July - 6th August 2006
============================================
Ruby Weekly News summarises some of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to you
by Tim Sutherland.
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* RuportDay2006: A day of fun, prizes, and reporting software!
--------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory Brown announced a 24-hour contest for "finding bugs, squashing
bugs, proposing API changes / feature additions, writing docs, etc."
for the Ruport reporting library. It will be held on the 13th of
August, and has prizes: US$100 cash for first place, $80 for second,
and $70 for third (sponsorship thanks to BTree Technology).
Gregory is working on Ruport as part of the Google Summer of Code.
* More info on RubyConf 2006 registration
-----------------------------------------
Registration for RubyConf 2006 opened on August 2nd, and sold out.
The conference is in Denver, Colorado, on October 20-22nd, and is run
by Ruby Central. Inc.
* New Ruby Culture T-Shirts!
----------------------------
Matt Todd designed a bunch of shirts expressing Ruby culture, with
Ruby code, quotes (especially from _why), Japanese animals etc.
In "Speaking of T-shirts...", Hal Fulton posted some of his own
designs, with a "Ruby geek" symbol based on ESR's idea of using the
floater from Conway's Game of Life.
You can buy Mark's shirts through Spreadshirt, and Hal's through
cafepress. There is also James Britt's RubyStuff.
* ICFP and OOPSLA in Portland, Oregon
-------------------------------------
"For those of you who didn't get in to RubyConf or who didn't attend
OSCON/FOSCON, there are a couple more opportunities to visit my home
town in the context of programming languages."
There's the International Conference on Functional Programming on
September 18-20, and OOPSLA on October 22-26 (Object-Oriented
Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications - an ACM SIGPLAN
International Conference).
User Group News
===============
* Ruby/Rails User Groups in Southern California
-----------------------------------------------
The Orange County Ruby Users Group have a formal meeting every fourth
Thursday, reported Scott Hodson. Every other Thursday they meet
informally at a place having free WiFi.
* SanDiego.rb Meeting Tomorrow, August 3rd
------------------------------------------
San Diego Rubyists had a meeting on August 3rd, said Kevin Clark.
"Chris Abad will be talking about experiences developing and deploying
out.landi.sh with Ruby on Rails. Jordan Fowler will be giving us a run
down on access control and acts_as_authenticated."
Quote of the Week
=================
* Bug or Feature?
-----------------
Tammo Freese: "I would expect that method calls and proc calls do not
differ in such a way. Is this a bug or a feature?"
Matz: "It's a feature, but we are trying to fix it in the next major
release (1.9 or 2.0)."
Link of the Week
================
* Summer of Rails
-----------------
Patrick Crowley's come up with a great way of motivating himself and
others to learn Rails and create useful applications.
Summer of Rails has been running for about a month, and finishes on
September 23rd. It already has links to 15 Rails sites that have been
created as a result of the project, and it has a fantastic logo
Threads
=======
Session support for SOAP client
-------------------------------
D.Kay wondered how to call a web service that has a `Login' method
returning a user_id that must then be passed to subsequent methods?
He'd got it to work with XMLRPC::Client, but how do you store session
cookies with SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory?
Hiroshi Nakamura explained that if you install http-access2 you can then
write
driver.options["protocol.http.cookie_store_file"] = "cookie.file"
humanized Xml tree navigation
-----------------------------
chiaro scuro asked if anyone knows a library that lets you access an XML
tree like "normal objects", e.g. people.person[2].name.
Hiroshi Nakamura posted some code using XSD::Mapping from the standard
library:
require 'xsd/mapping'
people = XSD::Mapping.xml2obj(File.read("people.xml"))
people.person[2].name # => "name3"
You can also write e.g. people['foo-bar'] to deal with tags that have
hyphens etc. obj2xml can convert an object tree into XML.
Ruby Cookbook
-------------
There were around 40 posts talking about the Ruby Cookbook (by Lucas
Carlson and Leonard Richardson, published by O'Reilly).
Much of the discussion was around the lack of an electronic version of the
book (e.g. PDF), but James Edward Gray II said:
extending ruby with ocaml
-------------------------
Ara.T.Howard highlighted ProjectIdeas/RubyOCaml from the SciRuby wiki, a
simple proof-of-concept of calling Objective Caml code from Ruby (using C
as an intermediate language).
"[T]his has seen the list before but, seeing all the interest in ocaml
recently i thought i'd post it again".
Ilmari Heikkinen recalled some discussion around adding OCaml support to
RubyInline, and asked "did anything come out of that?"
New Releases
============
There were many more releases this week than those listed below.
Check out the RubyForge main page for more release announcements.
Motiro 0.4.2
------------
Thiago Arrais released a new version of his software tracking system
(featuring a "Subversion front end, an event notification system and a
smallish wiki-like language for page edition with support for
translation"). It's similar to Trac.
"It has borrowed its name from an ancient tupy word meaning a work
gathering. Motiro is a time when people get together to collaborate on a
common goal such as harvesting food or building houses."
Nitro/Og 0.31.0
---------------
Gabriele Renzi announced Nitro 0.31. "The release is mostly due to the
great work of Bryan Soto at integrating patches from the community and to
the nicety of darcs
"Nitro is a web application framework, and Og is an object
persistence/mapping library.
There were discussions about the differences between Rails and Nitro.
(They've existed for roughly the same amount of time.)
JRuby Extras - making Ruby apps spectacular in the Java world
-------------------------------------------------------------
Charles O Nutter happily announced the "JRuby Extras" project.
"This project is intended to be a community-maintained nursery of plugins
and extensions to extend JRuby's capabilities and to provide Java-based
versions of many popular C extensions."
Projects so far include a `port' of Mongrel, an ActiveRecord JDBC adapter
and a set of Java-aware Rake tasks.
"Anyone interested in porting an extension to Java or making their
favorite Ruby app run under JRuby should join the project!"