From: Dave@... Date: 2002-08-20T09:33:21+09:00 Subject: Ruby Weekly News Ruby Weekly News: 08/19/2002 A summary of activity on the ruby-talk mailing list, brought to you this week by Pat Eyler. ANNOUNCEMENTS ============= ZenWeb 2.11.0 ZenWeb is a tool for building websites (not web pages). It applies a defined set of fileters to files of content (often flat text or lightly marked up text (think wiki)) and creted hierarchically navigable pages with a consistent theme and design. FXRuby-1.0.12 Ruby bindings for the FOX GUI toolkit. Source, windows installers, and RPMs are available. ONI - Object Network Interface Formerly a portion of TomsLib, now a separate project, ONI is a YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) version of XML-RPC and SOAP. For now, the code is still in TomsLib, but will be made available separately soon. Where Ruby Really Sparkles Not software, but an announcment nonetheless. Dave Thomas' article on network programming with ruby is in the latest edition of "Linux Magazine". Net/Proto This module provides an interface to the getprotobyname(), getprotobynumber() and getprotoent() functions. (More cool stuff from Daniel Berger ... thank you sir.) Narf cgi library alpha release NARF is an attempt to create a lighter web library. It has been designed so that the api can be easily tested from within applications and so that the api is thouroughly tested internally. INTERESTING THREADS =================== Ruby Weekly News Just to be self-referential ... we discussed the Ruby Weekly News. It seems that there is some interest in how things get done. Holden and I briefly replied, and invited people to let us know if there is any news that needs to be made more available. Problems with Marshal Daniel Berger ran into inconsistancies when using Marshal. After some troublshooting it was determined that he was using gets/puts to pass data to/from sockets, thus missing some of the data. Using #read and #write was recommended. (Hugh Sasse recommended packing the data into base64 for transmission and provided sample code to do so.) A few newbie questions... Christopher asked about RubyWin and other windows specific bits, then asked for tips getting started with ruby in general. Patrick Bennet answered that RubyWin is an MDI app to protoytpe/test Ruby. It allows you to type in code, execute it, tweak it, ad infinitum. For the beginner, he recommended the Pickaxe. Some discussion followed about the online version of the book. I liked Tim Hunter's comment 'the online version ... is most useful as a supplement to a printed copy. ... buy the book and consider it an investment...'. _The_Ruby_Way_ was suggested as the second book you should buy. Second Sydney Ruby users group meeting The Sydney (.au) users group met on the 15th of August in the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel. (Even if I didn't think users groups rock, I'd have included this tidbit just so I could type that name!) From here on out they'll be meeting on the third Thursday of the month. If you've got travel plans to Sydney, make a note. Thought Question: Where does "new" come from? Hal Fulton put the question, and was immediately answered by Matz. The discussion took off from there. I can't summarize it, so you'd better go and read it yourself. Using Test::Unit to assert messages appeared on $stdout/$stderr Jeff Gray wondered about using Test::Unit to check for warning messages (a la DejaGnu). Massimiliano Mirra quickly offered up stringio.rb as a solution. Nat Pryce followed with the recommendation that perhaps the function being hard to test meant that the design needed to be rethought. He added that the object under test use a stream object to write messages to, while being tested a mock object could be used, in production a reference to stdout or stderr would be used. IDE vs editor Wow, holy war territory and it stayed friendly. Lots of cool thoughts about IDEA, Eclipse, Emacs, and VIm. With 33 messages in the thread, I'm not even going to try and summarize ... just hit the link below.