From: timsuth@... (Tim Sutherland) Date: 2004-11-23T20:03:05+09:00 Subject: Ruby Weekly News 15th-21st November 2004 http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyNews/2004-11-15 (NB: I fixed all the google groups links in the previous weekly news editions. We now use "clean" urls.) Ruby Weekly News 15th-21st November 2004 ---------------------------------------- A summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup. There were around 636 messages in 148 threads. This summary is brought to you by Tim Sutherland (TimSuth). Articles and Announcements -------------------------- * [Learn To Program translated to Japanese] Chris Pine reported that "Shin Nishiyama, a research associate at Chiba University, has translated "Learn To Program" into Japanese!" Chris created the original online English tutorial as a way of teaching Ruby to non-programmers. * [New issue of Rubyist Magazine] On behalf of Sasada Koichi, Steve Brumbaugh announced Volume 3 of the Japanese Rubyist Magazine. This edition includes tutorials on Win32OLE, Nora and interacting with Java resources and a story about "a group of five heroes known as the "Special Programming/Debugging Rangers (SPD)" who battle bugs and ensure the peace and safety of the programming gods." Translations of this and previous volumes into English will appear in the Ruby zine, due for launch in January 2005. * [Talk about mainstream...] Sitting in a hotel room in England, Dave Thomas decided to tune into the quiz show [University Challenge] on TV. How is this relevant to Ruby? Well, one of the questions was "Which programming language was named after a precious stone by its creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, to suggest it is a jewel of a language?" Unfortunately the Cambridge team answered "Perl"! * [Ruby in the Rainy City] Pat Eyler announced for Seattle.rb that the first Pacific Northwest Ruby Meeting - Ruby in the Rainy City - is on Saturday, 11 December 2005 in Seattle. Everyone's invited. * [Extending Ruby with C] gabriele renzi found an [article by Garrett Rooney] at OnLamp.com. It describes the process of writing C extensions in Ruby. New Releases ------------ * [Nitro 0.4.1] George Moschovitis released a new version of his web application engine [Nitro]. The rendering engine has been rewritten to support Rails-style actions. * [RMagick 1.6.1] Tim Hunter updated [RMagick] to work with ImageMagick 6.1.3 and later. * [SuperStruct] Hal Fulton created [SuperStruct]. This is like OpenStruct, but creates real classes and behaves like both Array and Hash (for example, it remembers the order of the fields). * [Rails 0.8.5: Better fixtures, shared generators, sendmail for AM, lots of fixes!] David Heinemeier Hansson announced the latest [Rails] release. This includes contributions from 22 developers (especially Jeremy Kemper who was responsible for a third of the changes). Among the many improvements in this version is to do with the way dependencies are handled. This will continue to evolve, with [Needle] slated for inclusion in version 0.9. * [Needle 1.2.0] [Needle-Extras 1.0.0] Speaking of [Needle], Jamis Buck brought us another update of his dependency injection container. Services can now have parameters which are passed to the constructor block of the service. He also introduced version 1.0.0 of Needle-Extras, a library containing additional utilities and services for use with Needle. * [rpa-base 0.2.3 ] Mauricio Fernandez released [rpa-base] 0.2.3, the package manager for the Ruby Production Archive (RPA). This is mainly a bugfix release. * [postgres-pr (pure Ruby PostgreSQL)] Michael Neumann announced the first public release of postgres-pr, a client library for PostgreSQL, written in pure Ruby (the existing client library is a wrapper around the C library). This was received enthusiastically by several PostgreSQL users and Michael later produced a compatibility library that enables the use of postgres-pr with [ActiveRecord]. * [wxRuby 0.6.0] Nick presented a new version of [wxRuby], the Ruby bindings to the wxWidgets GUI library. * [(Yet Another?) RSS::Parser test suite] Giulio Piancastelli ported Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser tests to produce a test suite for RSS::Parser. * [FeedBlender 0.1.0] Francis Hwang released [FeedBlender], a tool for aggregating several RSS feeds into one. * [RVG - a 2D drawing library add-on for RMagick] Tim Hunter uploaded the first release of [RVG] - Ruby Vector Graphics. This is an addition to RMagick that provides 2D vector graphics. Threads ------- Interesting threads this week included: [[SUMMARY] Countdown (#7)] -------------------------- James Edward Gray II summarised last week's [Ruby Quiz] (write a program that takes a list of numbers and a target integer and finds a way of using arithmetic operations on the numbers to produce the target). [[QUIZ] Object Browser (#8)], [[SOLUTION] Object Browser (#8)] -------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Menard designed this week's [Ruby Quiz]. The problem was to write a generic object browser that will "interactively browse a graph of connected objects by showing their instance variables and letting me click through to browse". Jamis Buck posted his solution which uses gtk2. [mathn.rb is unacceptably slow (proposed replacements)] ------------------------------------------------------- erlercw found that Integer#gcd2 and the Prime class from mathn.rb are much slower than they could be, and provided replacements that are thousands of times faster. This was achieved by creating a cache of primes. Matz announced he would merge the changes. [The Poetry of Code] -------------------- Curt Hibbs referred us to a blog post by Robert Cottrell on [The Poetry of Code], in particular Ruby. A quote: a Ruby program before I even notice is already done