From: Dave@...
Date: 2002-05-28T05:18:20+09:00
Subject: Ruby Weekly News


   Ruby Weekly News: 05/27/2002

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

   ANNOUNCEMENTS
   =============

   Xmms-Ruby 0.1.1
          Paul Duncan has posted a new version of his XMMS bindings for
          Ruby. Get Xmms-Ruby([1]).

   Ruby/DICT 0.9.0
          Ian Macdonald has released a new version of Ruby/DICT.
          Ruby/DICT is an RFC 2229 compliant client-side library
          implementation of the DICT protocol. It can be used to write
          clients that access dictionary definitions from a set of
          natural language dictionary databases. Get Ruby/DICT([2]).

   ruby-htmltools
          Ned Konz has written a tree-building HTML parser that is handy
          for doing analysis, repair, or transformations of HTML text.
          Get ruby-htmltools([3]) via the RAA.

   SOAP4R 1.4.5
          NAKAMURA, Hiroshi has released a new version of SOAP4R. Too
          much new stuff to list. Get SOAP4R([4]).

   Ruby-GSL 0.1.6
          Arno Erpenbeck has announced a new version of Ruby-GSL. GSL is
          the GNU Scientific Library, a collection of routines for
          numerical computing. Get Ruby-GSL([5]).

   INTERESTING THREADS
   ===================

   Tests become documentation
          Dave Thomas has asked the community how they might like to use
          RDoc([6]) to extract documentation from unit tests. Many
          interesting ideas where tossed around in this thread, too many
          to list.

   Idea for a book
          Peter Hickman thought a great idea for a book would be Design
          Patterns in Ruby. I agree that it is nice to have a collection
          of examples addressing this area. Nat Pryce took the initiative
          a long time ago and created 2 wiki pages at RubyGarden([7]),
          one is focused on example design patterns in Ruby([8]) and the
          other focuses on Ruby idioms([9]).

   Ruby cookbook down
          The rubycookbook web site is temporarily down until it finds a
          new home.

   Unit testing other code
          Phil Tomson has asked about unit testing C++ code through
          Test::Unit([10]). Some very interesting ideas came up such as
          an executable spec that translates Ruby into classes of the
          other language.

References

   1. http://www.pablotron.org/software/xmms-ruby/
   2. http://www.caliban.org/ruby/
   3. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=ruby-htmltools
   4. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=SOAP4R
   5. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=ruby-gsl
   6. http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/
   7. http://www.rubygarden.com/
   8. http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ExampleDesignPatternsInRuby
   9. http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyIdioms
  10. http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=Test%3A%3AUnit