Ruby Weekly News

   Ruby Weekly News: 03/24/2003

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

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

   Ruby Tutorial v0.3
          Daniel Carrera has made a copy of his Ruby Tutorial available
          for download([1]). The tutorial is an excellent resource for
          the beginning programmer and is also available for online
          perusal in html([2]) format.

   CursWrap v0.1.2
          Julian Snitow introduced CursWrap, which provides a
          higher-level of abstraction than the ncurses library, the idea
          not being to provide a 1:1 mapping for each C function in
          curses, but instead to abstract away most of the more painful
          "legacy" aspects and expose useful functionality via a cleaner,
          simpler interface. Check out CursWrap([3]).

   DataVision v0.7.4
          Jim Menard released DataVision v0.7.4. DataVision is 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 as HTML, XML, PDF,
          LaTeX2e, DocBook, or tab- or comma-delimited text files. The
          output files produced by LaTeX2e and DocBook can in turn be
          used to produce PDF, text, HTML, PostScript, and more.

          Though written in Java, DataVision uses Ruby as its formula
          language thanks to JRuby (http://jruby.sourceforge.net). Take a
          look at DataVision([4]).

   Rake v0.2.0
          Jim Weirich made the initial release of Rake, a simple ruby
          build program with capabilities similar to make. Get Rake([5]).

   mp3info v0.1

   Guillaume Pierronnet released mp3info, a library for accessing low
   level information on mp3 files such as bitrate, length, samplerate,
   and other attributes. Take a look at mp3info([6])

   vcard v0.2

   Sam Roberts has released v0.2 of his vcard library, an implementation
   of the MIME Content-Type for Directory Information (RFC 2425), and
   profiles of the format. vcard is available here([7]).

   Ruby-GNOME2 v0.4.0

   Masao Mutoh announced the release of Ruby-GNOME2 version 0.4.0.
   Ruby-GNOME2 is a set of Ruby language bindings for the GNOME 2.x
   development environment. The full package includes support for GLib2,
   GdkPixbuf2, Pango, GTK2, GNOME2, GnomeCanvas2, Libart2, Libglade2, and
   GConf2.

   Ruby-GNOME2 is available from sourceforge([8]).

   ncurses 0.7.1

   Tobias Peters released v0.7.1 of the ncurses library, a Ruby extension
   which provides almost complete access to the C ncurses library and can
   additionally be used to wrap the PDCurses library. Download
   ncurses([9]).

   RubLog v0.8

   Dave Thomas released RubLog, a simple Ruby blogging package. RubLog is
   written in pure Ruby and features a simple installation procedure,
   allows blog documents to be in RDoc, HTML, and plain text format, and
   includes support for CVS repository entry storage as well as other
   interesting features.

   Check out RubLog([10]) (and take a look at Dave's blog([11]), as
   well).
   INTERESTING THREADS
   ===================

   Strong advantages over Python
          Greg McIntyre wanted some advice from the Ruby community for a
          lecture to students who had previously been introduced to
          Python. What resulted was a popular thread (spawning a number
          of related threads) about the real differences between the
          languages and common misconceptions about their relative
          limitations. A very interesting thread with quite a few unique
          perspectives.

   XML too hard (YAML opportunity?)
          Another thread evoking a lot of interest this week was started
          by Phil Tomson in response to a slashdot article([12]).
          Covering a wide variety of views on markup languages and how
          they can be manipulated in Ruby, the role of XML([13]) and
          YAML([14]) within our community, and the relative strengths of
          each--a poignant thread and well worth a read.

References

   1. http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/ruby/0.3/learning-ruby.tar.gz
   2. http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/ruby/0.3/
   3. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=curswrap
   4. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=33343
   5. http://w3.one.net/~jweirich/tools/rake/.
   6. http://davedd.free.fr/ruby-mp3info/
   7. http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=vcard
   8. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=53614
   9. http://ncurses-ruby.berlios.de/
  10. http://pragprog.com/pragdave
  11. http://pragprog.com/pragdave
  12. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/18/0712248;mode=thread;tid=95;tid=156
  13. http://www.rubyxml.org/
  14. http://www.yaml.org/