[ Thanks to Steve
Tuckner for this link. ]
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