As I was mowing the lawn, I had an idea for a series I thought might be fun.
I’d like to put out an entry once a month about an new or highly active Ruby project that’s looking to gain some extra exposure. People can send me proposals for their projects, and I’ll pick one each month to write about here. This way, if you’re way behind on your mailing list reading, you’ll be able to easily find at least one new project announcement each month.
Below are the semi-arbitrary rules for submission:
Project must be fresh / actively developed
Project must be released before the time I post
Proposal should consist of nothing more than a code example and a link to your project page, no additional commentary needed
Project can’t be Rails-centric
You must be a developer on the project
My project choices will be entirely subjective and unjustified. :)
The reason these rules are fairly specific is that I’m hoping that this series will be a sort of grass-roots effort to have Ruby recognized as a useful language standing on its own two legs. If someone else wanted to start up a similar series about Rails projects on this blog or elsewhere, that’d be great.
I’m also stipulating that the project needs to be relatively new and fresh, because there is no shortage of coverage of the more popular Ruby projects out there. This is a chance to give new folks and new projects some time to shine.
Please email me your submissions by June 30th. I’ll get in touch with my favorite pick some time in the first week of July, and have a post out then. Hopefully this will be a fun little series, and a useful service to those having trouble keeping up on the latest Ruby software.
It’s time to kick off the O’Reilly Ruby coverage of the Google Summer of Code with our first student post. The following announcement is from Scott Ostler about his project, Rubyland. Scott is pursuing a masters degree in Computer Science at MIT. He is researching collaborative writing software for handheld devices.
At RailsConf 2007 DHH mentioned that Rails 2.0 would support query caching on the client side in order to speed up AR. I immediately thought to myself, “Huh? Why do it on the client side when the database server will handle that?”.
Last year, one of the most difficult things about keeping track of the progress of the Ruby projects in Google’s Summer of Code was finding where the students / mentors were talking about their projects. Since several of the bloggers on O’Reilly Ruby are directly involved in the the Summer of Code in one way or another, we decided that we’d try to make things a little easier for the community for GSoC 2007.
We’ve sent out an open invite to all students and mentors who are assigned to RubyCentral for the summer. Rather than just relaying second hand news, we’ve encouraged those involved to submit blog posts to us, and we’ll post them all here using the special GSoC account. If you missed the original announcement, please contact Gregory Brown, as he’ll be coordinating the effort.
Better than half of the students involved this summer have expressed interest in participating with us. We’re busy collecting bios, and will soon make a post that introduces the folks who will be blogging with us this summer, and a little more detail about their projects.
One of the students involved has plans to have an announcement about their project ready by the end of the month, so keep an eye out for that!
I have an admission to make. I love my TIVO because I can skip over the commercials. But even so, I always stop and watch when one of the Mac vs. PC ads comes one (even the ones I’ve seen already). Now that’s effective advertising!
So, I was delighted to see takeoffs that Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com did, Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails…, pitting Java against Rails:
I’ll try not to turn this into a pander-fest, but I’ve got a few announcements, and since this blog is finally starting to get some great reader commentary, this is as good a place as any to make them. If you’re just interested in hacking with Ruport, you can check out the 1.0 release notes.
If you’re already sick of hearing about Ruport from me, I promise to quiet down soon :)
With the decent success of the last post, why not throw another opinion into the mix?
This is something that comes up every now and again on RubyTalk and other community forums, but it always starts something like this: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could start teaching Ruby in schools instead of C/C++/Java/Forth/Lisp/Fortan/COBOL/BASIC/Brainf*ck?”
I usually try to shy away from opinion posts (on this blog and elsewhere). When I do make them, I usually ask a few people if they think I’m asking for trouble.
This post: I don’t care if I am (but I hope I’m not).
Its getting downright exciting in the dynamic languages arena!
First, Sun hires the JRuby developers and implements killer Ruby support in Netbeans. Now, Microsoft announces IronRuby and the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)! Microsoft’s new DLR will support Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and Visual Basic. Since the DLR is built on top of the CLR, these dynamic languages will interoperate with the existing statically typed languages like C#.
As a bonus, Microsoft is releasing all of this under a BSD-style license, the Microsoft Permissive License. Hopefully, this is a true BSD-style license without any gotchas, but if anyone knows more about the details of this license, please post a comment. On top of all this, Microsoft’s new cross-browser Silverlight plugin will allow all of this to run client-side in the browser!
Jon Udell has a podcast where he interviews John Lam about the DLR and IronRuby. John is the creator of RubyCLR, who was later hired by Microsoft to create IronRuby.
