Sorry, it isn’t entirely Ruby related… it is Python Django to be specific, but it is a message aimed at you (”the wiki-worker types”) from Lawrence Lessig recruiting people to tag members of Congress at Change-Congress.org:

Today we’re launching the second stage of our project. We’re asking wiki-worker-types (and that includes you) to help us tag all candidates and Members of Congress, by tracking for each whether they support the planks of reform in the Change Congress movement or not. We’ve built a set of tools that you can use to document — for each plank of reform — whether a candidate supports that plank or not. After that information is verified by a volunteer administrator, we’ll add it to a map of reform that we’re building. After we’re done, we’ll have a picture of the level of support for fundamental reform of Congress. And with that map, we’ll launch stage 3 of our project — raising money to support candidates who support reform

Django has the edge in the civic-Web20-computing space as Holovaty’s Django was always more focused on the public square from the beginning. You would think Rails would be a no brainer for this, but in my brief encounter with the world of political web sites, many of the people I was talking to thought that PHP was king (ick). (In related news, this is the best online book interface I’ve seen yet.)

I’m sure you don’t believe it, doesn’t seem like NetBeans is going to take the Ruby developer world by storm, but Sun seems to be pouring money into Ruby support. I’m skeptical that the Ruby community is going to embrace Netbeans, but in this entry, I present some hints that NetBeans may be well on its way to becoming the Ruby IDE of choice. The idea that an IDE traditionally associated with Java development is going to take the Ruby world by storm might seem insane at first glance, but read on…

Via ComputerWorld:

“Leopard also offers a veritable playground for developers, with Ruby on Rails, Mongrel and Capistrano all baked into the operating system. Developers also get DTrace, which is built into the operating system’s core, allowing developers to observe, debug and tune applications in real time.”

I guess that also implies that it comes with RubyGems baked in? (Apologies for the shameless Mac-touting and link blogging.)

Check out Ola Bini’s blog: Updated JRuby on Rails performance numbers. Excerpt:

…we are talking about 9.5s MRI to 13.8s for JRuby, which I find is a quite nice achievement if you look at the numbers from Friday. We are inching closer and closer. Both the view and the controller numbers are looking very nice. This is actually indicative of a nice trend - since general JRuby primitive performance is really good, the slowness in our Regular Expression engine is weighed up by much faster execution speed.

JRuby/MRI seems to be the metric that Ola’s focused on: his numbers give a ratio of 1.45 for Rails Petstore (13.8/9.5) on October 16th.

Take a look at this post to JRuby’s Dev list on Oct 4th from Christian Seiler: “JRuby vs MRI - Petstore shootout”. In it he charts the improvement between JRuby revision 4383 (sep 25th) and 4470 (early oct). And he demonstrates about a 20% performance improvement between those two revisions. On October 4th jRuby/MRI was 1.565 for Rails Petstore (29.89/19.10).

C. Nutter is also focused on Performance Updates.

This year is a good year for Ruby on the east coast. We kicked things off with a bang with the Gotham Ruby Conference in April, saw the Ruby Hoedown come and go in Raleigh bringing along with it some great videos of their talks, and of course, will see the Seventh International RubyConf in Charlotte in just a couple months.

However, these aren’t the only games in town. We’ve also got Ruby East 2007, which is a one day, multi-track, Rails friendly regional conference at the Penn State Great Valley Campus. They’ve managed to get an impressive list of speakers together, and even let two of those vagabonds from the Ruby Reports project sneak in to do their ranting.

If you’re local to the area and don’t think you’ll make RubyConf this year, this is a good chance to still get your fix. If you’ve been tinkering with Ruport and want to shake down me or Mike, this is also a chance for that.

From what I’ve seen so far, these regional Ruby conferences are always a lot of fun, especially because each one takes on its own unique flavor. If you want to go to this one, you should probably register soon because the event takes place on Friday, September 28, which is right around the corner.

Hope to see you there!

I’m looking for someone to take over PDF::Writer, color-tools, and Transaction::Simple. I do not have time to maintain these anymore. I should have done this months ago, but pride of ownership and a belief that more free time would be just around the corner got in the way.

You can read more details on my original blog posting at my personal blog.

Anyone interested? Anyone know anyone interested?

This package is the most simple way to equip your Macintosh Apple OSX System with Ruby - similar to the Windows Ruby One-Click Installer. It replaces the broken Readline library, updates to a current version of SQLite3 and prepares your OSX for Rails, which needs at least Ruby 1.8.4 to run. The current Ruby Version is 1.8.6 (1.8.5 is recommended for Rails) and Rubygems 0.9.4.

This package’s intention is to remain small while being a Universal Binary that serves everything to deploy Ruby Applications on OSX Machines - Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger or Leopard. You don’t need to compile anything and you don’t need Apple’s Developer Tools (xcode) installed.

Some people use fink or other ports software, others (myself included) take the time to read through the HiveLogic post and do everything from scratch.

Now there’s another option, and if it lives up to its claims, it should be A Good Thing.

Nice introductory tutorial on Rake from the guys @ Rails Envy, which provides a brief history, introduces concepts such as tasks and namespaces and talks about its role within Rails.

It really makes me happy to see the increasing international interest in Rails and in Ruby. As I reported earlier, the official Ruby site is available in many languages (currently English, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Spanish), with more in the works. My original Rolling with Ruby on Rails was translated into Japanese, French, and Spanish. And now Bill Walton’s updated version of Rolling with Ruby on Rails has been translate to Brazilian Portuguese thanks to Gabriel Bogéa Perez!

Of course there is much more. If you know of Ruby and Rails resources in other native languages, please post the links in a comment and tell the rest of us about it!

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.

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:

They also did a second one that pits PHP 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 :)

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.

Capistrano 2.0 Preview 1 has been released. The first time I used Capistrano I was blown away by the ease with which you could deploy an application to a production network with multiple application servers.

New features include:

• Namespaces for Capistrano Tasks
• Deployment strategies - You don’t have to deploy via a Subersion checkout, now you can export, or you can export locally and copy a tgz or zip to the target server.
• Environment Variables via the Comand Line

I’m not doing it justice, for more information see www.capify.org.

Namespaces should make it easier to build atop Capistrano…

Namespaces should help projects like Mike Bailey’s deprec which extends Capistrano to automate not just the deployment of a rails application but the installation of a full rails stack.

Cap on Other Platforms

…And, this is the part that interests me, how Ruby, RoR, and the technologies built around them are infecting the broader community. From Ian Sefferman’s blog entry, Capistrano and Java:

Capistrano is definitely Rails tailored. It makes a lot of assumptions (in true Rails philosophy fashion) that make it dead simple to use for your new Rails app. However, there’s nothing really constricting about Cap itself that forces it to be Rails only. Recently, Maurice and I did our first Java project for Openomy. We knew we’d be deploying to more than one box, so we decided we’d try out Cap for deploying a Java service to multiple boxes. I figured I’d write up some of what we learned and what we’d like to change in the future.

Also, see Automated PHP Deployment with Capistrano.

Capistrano is only for crazy Rails apps right? Nope. Its simply a platform for automation. It just so happens that deployment usually requires quite a bit of steps. Hmmm…lots of steps…automation… a match made in heaven. So sure, Capistrano was thought up with Rails in mind, but created openly so you’re able to use it any way you’d like.

After months of planning and organizing, in just one day GoRuCo has come and gone. The Gotham Ruby Conference 2007 took place at Google’s NYC office on Saturday April 21st. It featured 6 talks, 3 from the tri-state region, three from outside the region, and a round of lightning talks.

As one of the organizers, I can tell you how much work it is to put something like this together. We had a fairly large team and I think we relied on each and every person’s unique contributions to make the whole thing come together. However, to credit our speakers and attendees, our whole purpose as organizers was simply to provide an environment and make sure it stayed functional. It was you guys who brought the show.

UPDATE: RC3 is out as of 2007.05.08, see release notes for details

Although I do copiously mention Ruport as a sick obsession of mine, I try not to use this blog to directly promote the project.

However, I think that I have some news-worthy info to share about the project, or at least something really exciting to me: We just put out our first 1.0 release candidate!

This is a rough RC, we expect quite a few changes before things finally gel. We also are farther behind on documentation then we want to be, but the functionality is getting quite good and after a 2.5 month hiding period, we’re excited to open the code back up to a whole lot more eyes.

If you’ve seen Ruport in the past, you may have been disappointed with our lack of grouping support, or the absense of the ability to render data by row rather than all at once. Or maybe you didn’t want to figure out how to deal with our rails plugin to use ActiveRecord in a camping project, or standalone. You might have also found our formatting system too brittle or our PDF support too weak.

Those things have changed. Come tell us what you think :)

Some links:

• RC1 release notes
• Ruport Mailing List
• Wiki/Trac

That should be enough shameless self promotion for now, but in all honesty, the overall improvements to Ruport have come through the support of our users, contributors and developers.

Also, Mike Milner is now churning about at much code as I am, and you can thank him for the revamp of our ActiveRecord support, which has finally made it’s way back into Ruport’s gem.

Looking forward to any and all feedback. If you’re on Freenode, you can usually catch up with us in #ruport, if you want to just chat informally.

Via loudthinking.com, DHH points to the Magic Multi-Connections plugin by Nic Williams. This plugin could be used in any number of ways, Nic has a recipe for randomly selecting a connection from a pool, but the plugin could just as easily be made to work with a set of model objects spread across multiple databases.

The interesting story behind this is on DHH’s blog. Read: Alex Payne’s interview, then read David’s response, and finally the post from Sunday Scaling to multiple databases with Rails.

Update from Pat Eyler (12:15 PM Central):

http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2007/04/15/on-twitter-rails-and-community

Kevin makes some important points about how the community should/does respond to people pointing out things that RoR doesn’t do well. He also has a good analysis of the response Alex Payne’s interview and offers some ideas for how this conversation could have happened differently.

For the second year in a row, I have the privilege of being a Summer of Code mentor for Ruby Central, the US-based organisation responsible for the promotion of the Ruby language and the parent organisation for both the International Ruby Conference and the International Rails Conferences.

RubyCentral is once again a Mentoring Organization for the Google Summer of Code. While we have a very strong pool of mentoring candidates, we’d love to see more student/project applications.

Applying as a student is pretty easy, all you need to do is go here and follow the directions. If you’ve already got an idea in the Ruby, RoR, JRuby, Xruby, rubinius, etc. space please submit it. If you’re stuck, take a look at some suggested ideas here.

Do move quickly though. The window for applications closes March 24th.

Today I came across this article, which describes how to install RoR on a Sun Java System Web Server 7.0.

Antonio Cangiano has provided a fascinating glimpse into the current state of the many VM implementations of Ruby. He has run a sizable set of benchmarks against seven different Ruby implementations:

• Ruby 1.8.5 on Linux
• Ruby 1.8.5 on Windows
• Ruby 1.9 (Yarv/Rite) on Linux
• JRuby on Linux
• Gardens Point Ruby.NET on Windows
• Rubinius on Linux
• Cardinal on Linux

The graph above shows the averages and median scores, but the details are just as interesting. I also completely agree with Antonio’s caveats:

• Don’t read too much into this and don’t draw any final conclusions. Each of these exciting projects have their own reason for being, as well as different pros and cons, which are not considered in this post. They each have a different level of stability and completeness. Furthermore, some of them haven’t been optimized for speed yet. Take this post for what it is: an interesting experiment;
• The results may entirely change in the next 3, 6, 12 months… I’ll be back!
• The scope of the benchmarks is limited because they can’t stress every single feature of each implementation. It’s just a sensible set of benchmarks that give us a general idea of where we are in terms of speed;
• These tests were run on my machine, your mileage may vary;

This year’s first regional Ruby conference, the MountainWest RubyConf will be held March 16th and 17th in Salt Lake City, UT. It is accepting registrations until Feb 23rd. While it might be small in its geographical reach, it looks like a very big conference in almost every other way.

I’m pleased to announce a new Ruby Users Group for folks north of San Francisco (or who like to go to Sebastopol, CA): the North Bay Ruby Users Group.

Our first meeting is this week; February 15th, 2007 at 7:00pm. O’Reilly has graciously offered us a place to meet, so we’ll be holding the meetings at O’Reilly HQ in Sebastopol, CA (directions).

Meetings are on the third Thursday of each month. If you’re interested in learning more, please sign up for the mailing list.

Our first meeting will feature Keith Fahlgren and myself, kicking things off by discussing how O’Reilly uses Ruby to make good things happen.

Please RSVP on the mailing list so we know how much pizza to buy. We hope to see you there!

Professors John Gough and Wayne Kelly at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, just announced the second release of their Ruby.NET compiler that statically compiles Ruby programs for the .NET CLR. Ruby is such a dynamic language that it hard for me to understand how they can even do this (an eWeek.com article last summer discussed some of the unique challenges).

The big news is that it successfully runs all 871 in Ruby’s installation test suite (in samples/test.rb). Their next goal is to get Ruby on Rails running:

We have just started work on getting Ruby on Rails to run on Ruby.NET and have started work on adding interoperability features to allow .NET programs written in other languages to conveniently use Ruby components and vice versa. We hope to include some of these features in the next public release.

Our plan now is to perform public releases more frequently, approximately once a month. Once we have stabalized the major design choices (including those required for interop) we will move to a more traditional open source type model where others can contribute directly to the code base. We expect this to happen in the second half of this year.

The Rails Cookbook is finally available! I wasn’t sure how the timing of the book’s production schedule and that of the release of Rails 1.2 would work out, but it looks like I nailed it. I had a blast working on it and with all the people in the community that helped make it a reality.

I know that many of you are waiting for the PDF version and I’m working with folks here at O’Reilly to make that happen by a week from Monday (Feb. 5th). Please watch the book’s catalog page or my blog for updates.

Andy Oram has been talking to some people who are interested in hiring Ruby developers for
work on a patent reform project.

Perhaps we should have a separate forum for job and project postings.

I just received this message from Brian McConnell. Brian is an O’Reilly author and blogger, and generally a smart guy. I didn’t know he was working in Rails–I’ve always thought of him as a Pythonista. Anyway, if you’re interested in this project, let him know. Description follows…

You’ve probably heard that RailsConf 2007 will be May 17-20 in Portland, Oregon.

Since my company CD Baby depends on Rails, and since we’re based in Portland, I decided to spend some company money to reward the people that MAKE Rails. Not just the ones who invented it, but the people who are actively improving it by contributing patches to Rails code.

* - We bought 20 full RailsConf registrations from O’Reilly. ($800 value)

* - We pre-paid for 20 rooms at the Jupiter Hotel, an incrediby cool funky modern hotel, a few blocks from the conference, with free wi-fi everywhere - for three nights : May 17, 18, 19 (a $300 value)

* - We reserved the DreamBox conference room at the Jupiter Hotel for the nights of May 17, 18, 19, for elite Rails hackers to gather, plug in, hack, eat, drink, etc. (priceless)

These 20 registrations, 20 hotel rooms, and access to the DreamBox will go to the top 20 contributors of Rails patches (as measured here) between January 1 and January 22!

(RailsConf is opening registration soon after January 22 - that’s why we have to make the Jan 22 cutoff date.)

In other words : if you want CD Baby to save you $1100 on RailsConf, sprint!

If you’re not already signed up at workingwithrails.com, sign up now. In your workingwithrails profile, mark yourself as a core contributor and enter your Trac username. Then all of your patches will be linked to your account.

Bookmark http://workingwithrails.com/contests/hackfest2007 to watch progress

Also see Jeremy’s announcement at http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/1/8/hackfest-2007-and-cdbaby-sprint

UPDATE : winners announced here

Ruby is now in the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, and has been declared Programming Language of the Year for 2006 because it had the largest popularity increase in 2006 of all the languages tracked:

We are glad to announce that Ruby has become “Programming Language of the Year 2006″. Ruby has the highest popularity increase in a year of all programming languages (+2.15%). Runner up this year is JavaScript with +1.31%. Both languages are boosted by their corresponding frameworks, Ruby On Rails and Ajax. This might be a new trend. In the recent past it was necessary to have a large company behind the language to get it in the spotlight (Sun with Java, Microsoft with C#), but nowadays a killer app appears to be sufficient. Viral marketing via the Internet works! The winners of the last 2 years, PHP and Java, are the losers of this year. Other trends that are observed are the growth of dynamically typed languages and the fact that the difference in popularity between languages is getting less.

This is awesome… ‘nuf said.

rubyinside.com presents the Ruby Advent Calendar 2006.

Day One (do you count down or up?) gave me a pointer to the sweet AWS::S3 library.

James E. Gray has been busily posting a series of articles about the ruby-talk to comp.lang.ruby gateway (The mail to news portion is discussed here). Given the impact that these have on the community, I’d say they should be required reading. Go take a look at them now, I’ll wait.

The One-Click Ruby Installer for Windows had its one millionth download sometime last night (you can see the download total on the RubyForge front page)! After working hard for the past five years to promote the use of Ruby, this is a really satisfying milestone!

Take a look at this monthly download graph that starts around August 2004 and runs through the end of last month (ignore that temporary spike around May, I believe that is a bug in the RubyForge stats somehow related to the download mirrors):

You can see the rise in downloads from 3,200 a month in August 2004 to 60,000 a month in October 2006 (earlier stats from RubyForge are now longer available, but I think downloads in 2003 were a few hundred a month). Of course the dramatic rise in downloads coincides with Ruby on Rails phenomenon.

It is so exciting to see the official Ruby language site becoming available in so many different languages. As of this morning, the Spanish version just went live! We already had English, Japanese, and Korean versions in operation.

But that is just the beginning. The list of translations that are still in progress is truly impressive: Brazillian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Norwegian, Polish, and Russian!

Update: The Polish version just went live, too!

RubyConf 2006 started today in Denver, Colorado. I wasn’t able to go this year, but fortunately others are (and will be) blogging about it. Please send me links that you find to RubyConf 2006 blog posts, and I’ll update this posting to keep track for everyone (send to curt at hibbs dot com).

Videos

• Matz’ keynote, RubyConf 2006
• Adam Keys’ USSRuby Sketch from RubyConf 2006
• Rich Kilmer’s Web 2.0: Beyond the Browser

Day 0

• Pat Eyler: Before RubyConf 2006
• Austin Ziegler: Ruby Conference 2006 - Day 0

Day 1

• Austin Ziegler: Ruby Conference 2006 - Day 1
• Austin Ziegler: Ruby Conference 2006 - Day 1, Evening
• Pat Eyler: RubyConf 2006: Day One
• Kevin Williams: RubyConf 2006, Day One

Day 2

• Kevin Williams: RubyConf 2006, Day Two
• Pat Eyler: RubyConf 2006: Day Two

Ruby Implementors Summit

• I wanted to break this one out separately, because I believe that it could eventually turn out to be very important. (Pat Eyler)

Blogging by Speaker/Topic

• History of Ruby by Masayoshi Takahashi (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Nathanial Talbott: Dynamism in Business (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Evan Phoenix: Sydney & Rubinius (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Glenn Vanderburg: Rinda (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Geoff Grosenbach: Graphics with Ruby (Nick Sieger)
• Zed Shaw: Fuzzing (Nick Sieger)
• John Long: Radiant CMS (Nick Sieger)
• Matz Roundtable (Nick Sieger)
• Laurent Sansonetti: Mac OS X and Ruby (Nick Sieger)
• Tim Bray: I18N, M17N, Unicode and All That (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Michael Granger: Natural language generation and processing in Ruby (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Matz Keynote (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• Rich Kilmer: Web 2.0 Beyond the Browser (Kevin Tew)
• Lightning Talks (Kevin Tew)
• RejectConf Summary (Kevin Tew)
• Justin Gehtland: Streamlined (Kevin Tew)
• Koichi SASADA: YARV: on Rails? (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)
• John Lam: You’ve got your Ruby in my CLR (Nick Sieger, Kevin Tew)

RubyConf Retrospectives

• Charles Oliver Nutter: Rite, Rubinius, and Everything: Seeking the Answer to Ruby’s Future

Update 1: Pat Eyler and Kevin Williams are also blogging the conference. I have added their links above.

Update 2: Keven Tew and Nick Seiger are blogging by speaker, rather than by day. I added their links above.

Update 3: Added Day Two.

Update 4: Four mose individual sessions reported by Kevin Tew.

Update 5: Nick Seiger posted a couple more individual sessions, and Pat Eyler posted about day two.

Update 6: Pat Eyler reported on the Ruby Implementor’s Summit.

Update 7: Added links to videos from RubyConf 2006 (including Matz’ keynote).

Update 8: Added links RubyConf Retrospectives.

First Sun hires the JRuby developers, and now Microsoft hires the RubyCLR developer. Include the VM being developed specifically for Ruby, YARV, and that makes a total of the three VM based implementations of Ruby that are under active development… WOW!