Ruby Weekly News

   Ruby Weekly News: 03/04/2003

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

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

   Happy Birthday Ruby, RubyConf(2003)
          February 24th, 2003 marked Ruby's 10th anniversary! Happy
          Birthday, Ruby! And congrats to Matz!

          With that announcement, David Black was happy to announce the
          official opening of a new organization, Ruby Central,
          Inc([1]),a 509(c)(3) non-profit organization (tax-exempt status
          pending) dedicated to the promotion and support of Ruby and
          Ruby-related activities that was created last summer and served
          as the parent organization of the 2002 International Ruby
          Conference in Seattle.

          Not to be outdone (by himself?) David then made public the
          location and dates of RubyConf(2003), which will be held
          November 14-16 in Austin, Texas, USA.

   European Ruby Conference
          The first European Ruby Conference will be held from Saturday
          21th to Sunday 22th June at the University of Karslruhe in
          Germany. The visitor sign-up and call for speakers has begun!

          Check out the ruby-talk announcement([2]) for further details.

   RAA v2.3.1
          The Ruby Application Archive has made a variety of changes to
          its interface recently, and now stands at version 2.3.1. Thanks
          again to the RAA development team for all their hard work
          implementing various ideas from members of the Ruby community.
          Point your browser to the new RAA([3]).

   Coco/rb v0.5.0
          Mark Probert has released version 0.5.0 of Coco/rb, a Ruby port
          of the Coco/r LL(1) recursive decent scanner-parser which uses
          an attributed grammar that is very similar to EBNF.

          Check out Coco/rb([4]).

   plruby v0.3.3
          Another release of plruby (v0.3.3) was released by Guy Decoux.
          plruby is a loadable procedural language for the Postgres
          database system that enables Ruby to create functions and
          trigger procedures.

          plruby is available here([5]).

   Joystick-Ruby v0.1.0
          Paul Duncan has released Joystick-Ruby, Linux joystick bindings
          for Ruby. Check out Joystick-Ruby([6]).

   REXML v2.5.7, v2.4.7
          Sean Russell has accomplished a double bugfix-release of the
          very popular REXML library.

          REXML is an XML 1.0 compliant, reasonably fast, non-validating
          XML parser that supports multiple encodings. It has an API that
          is designed to be intuitive, straightforward, and terse. REXML
          includes a tree model parser, a SAX2 streaming parser, and a
          pull parser. It also includes a full XPath implementation. All
          of REXML's parsers pass 100% of the Oasis XML non-validating
          tests.

          REXML is available here([7]).

   DataVision v0.7.2
          Jim Menard has released v0.7.2 of DataVision, an Open Source
          reporting tool similar to Crystal Reports. Reports can be
          designed using a drag-and-drop GUI. They may be run, viewed,
          and printed from the application, or exported in a variety of
          formats. DataVision is written in Java, but uses Ruby for the
          formula and scripting language.

          DataVision is available at sourceforge([8]).

   oocp v2.0.0
          Shin-ichiro HARA released v2.0.0 of oocp, a command-line
          program for copying and comparing directories.

          Check out oocp([9]).

   FXRuby v1.0.20
          Lyle Johnson was pleased to announce the latest release of
          FXRuby, the Ruby language bindings for the FOX GUI toolkit. FOX
          is a C++ toolkit for developing graphical user interfaces
          easily and effectively and offers a wide, and growing,
          collection of widgets, as well as a number of state-of-the-art
          facilities.

          We're equally pleased to announce you can download FXRuby
          here([10]).

   xml-configfile v0.9.0
          Maik Schmidt released xml-configfile v0.9.0, a library for easy
          handling of XML configuration files. It allows you to access
          configuration parameters stored in an XML file by using XPath.

          Take a look at xml-configfile([11]).

   BtPgsql v0.0.0
          Ara Howard made an initial release of BtPgsql (Bi-Temporal
          PostgreSQL), which is a module containing a set of classes used
          to manage bi-temporal relations stored in a PostgreSQL([12])
          database.

          Check out BtPgsql([13])

   RMagick v1.0.0
          Tim Hunter released v1.0.0 of RMagick, a Ruby extension for the
          ImageMagick([14]) image processing library.

          Get RMagick([15]).

   Radical v0.65
          Idan Sofer released v0.65 of Radical, a web application
          server/framework written in pure Ruby. This version offers
          support for YAMl configuration files, uses additional
          optimizations to enhance speed, and has a variety of other new
          features.

          Check out Radical([16]).

   DbTalk v0.72
          Dalibor Sramek released v0.72 of DbTalk, an interactive GUI
          based tool for database querying, programming, and
          administration consisting of an SQL editor, query result
          viewer, and database structure viewer.

          DbTalk is available here([17]).

   fsdb v0.1
          Joel VanderWerf made an initial release of fsdb (file system
          database), which provides a thread-safe, process-safe Database
          class using the native file system as its back end and allowing
          multiple file formats and serialization methods.

          Check out fsdb([18]).

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

   ThisThread::Encompassed::LateFebruary
          We've all nested modules-- many of them, in some cases. Well,
          Bill Kleb wanted to know if there was a way to define
          This::Encompassing::That easily-- and if not, why? This kicked
          off a few posts-- many of them-- in which a variety of
          interesting suggestions and prohibitions were brought to light.

   Embedded Documentation, et al
          In "embedded docs," a question posed by Wojciech Kaczmarek
          regarding embedded documentation (ala Python) quickly turned
          into a discussion of its merits and limitations, perldoc,
          standards, archives, and an issue that affects all Ruby
          programmers-- documentation internationalization([19]).

References

   1. http://www.rubycentral.org/index.rb?dest=about;css=base
   2. http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/65418
   3. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/
   4. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=coco-rb
   5. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=pl-ruby
   6. http://www.pablotron.org/software/joystick-ruby/
   7. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=REXML
   8. http://datavision.sourceforge.net/
   9. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=oocp
  10. http://www.fxruby.org/
  11. http://www.ruby-lang.org/raa/list.rhtml?name=xml-configfile
  12. http://www.postgresql.org/
  13. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=btpgsql
  14. http://www.imagemagick.org/
  15. http://home.nc.rr.com/rmagick/
  16. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=radical
  17. http://www.insula.cz/dbtalk/
  18. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=fsdb
  19. http://www.ruby-talk.org/blade/65576