rails boredom antidote?

[Giles Bowkett]

Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
out. Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
on in Ruby that doesn't Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and
exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.?

So far the most interesting not-Rails Ruby projects I'm aware of are
Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on?
Bonus points if the Web isn't even remotely involved. Huge bonus
points if robots or psychedelic visuals are.

--
Giles Bowkett

Podcast: http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com
Blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
Portfolio: http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
Tumblelog: http://giles.tumblr.com

 

[Ben Bleything]

Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
out. Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
on in Ruby that doesn't Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and
exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.?

I've been there. I think most of the people who have been doing Rails
for longer than 6 months have been. My solution was to start building
libraries for anything that interested me.

So far the most interesting not-Rails Ruby projects I'm aware of are
Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on?
Bonus points if the Web isn't even remotely involved. Huge bonus
points if robots or psychedelic visuals are.

Amusingly, the first library I took on was OSX's Sync Services via
RubyCocoa I also joined up with a project that had a plist library
and worked on that a bit.

As for robots and psychedelia, check out RAD (another project that I
work on, though I don't own it), which is all about programming the
Arduino prototyping board from Ruby. rad.rubyforge.org. You could
easily use it to control a robot, and there are plenty of people using
Arduinos to make visual art.

Back to non-me stuff, though, my best advice is to find a problem that's
interesting to you, that nobody else has tried yet (or that needs love)
and hack on it. Rails often seems to behave as a gateway drug to get
you into the pure awesomeness of Ruby.

Ben

 

[James Britt]

Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
out.

Makes sense.

Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
on in Ruby that doesn't Rails?

* Ramaze. And Nitro.

* JRuby desktop apps


Or, what in Rails is interesting and

exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.?

So far the most interesting not-Rails Ruby projects I'm aware of are
Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on?
Bonus points if the Web isn't even remotely involved. Huge bonus
points if robots or psychedelic visuals are.

I bet JRuby + Swing could do the trippy visuals.

See Monkeybars.

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
out. Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
on in Ruby that doesn't Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and
exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.?

I'd venture to guess that Rails work in all covers about half of the
total Ruby ergs expended. So, leaving aside alternative web frameworks,
there are plenty of projects to choose from.

On your second question, about the only thing *I* find interesting in
Rails is performance tuning it. I discovered Rails before I discovered
Ruby, but I just couldn't get into the "Rails attitude", dismissed the
hype, and went directly to learning Ruby.

So far the most interesting not-Rails Ruby projects I'm aware of are
Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on?
Bonus points if the Web isn't even remotely involved. Huge bonus
points if robots or psychedelic visuals are.

There is quite a bit of that going on ... some other people have posted
on the subject. Do a Google for "dorkbot" and I think some stuff will
surface.

 

[dusty]

Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
out. Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
on in Ruby that doesn't Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and
exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.?

So far the most interesting not-Rails Ruby projects I'm aware of are
Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on?
Bonus points if the Web isn't even remotely involved. Huge bonus
points if robots or psychedelic visuals are.

--
Giles Bowkett

Podcast:http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com
Blog:http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
Portfolio:http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
Tumblelog:http://giles.tumblr.com

I'm having fun working on Merb and Sequel. I'm actually writing sys
admin types of classes to check on things such as CPU utilization,
filesystem space, file queue ages, web server response times, dns
queries, radius authentication, sql blocks, custom sql queries (on
mssql), ssl certificate expirations, etc... I then write simple
nagios plugins that uses curl to send a simple get to my merb server
and then parse very simple responses with grep. So nagios is really
just a scheduler and alerter right now, until I replace that too.
All the logic is in my ruby code.

I run merb with mutex off and make sure to set a timeout on expensive
things like snmpwalks, open-uri, or calling rsync externally. Its
been fun. Its mostly just a resource right now and I return plain/
text to the nagios script or xml if asked for it (in case our
developers ever want to write code to use my output).

Since its not really for an html front-end right now its kind of
neat. It feels more like scripting. I'm just using that framework to
load all my libraries/scripts into memory and to dispatch the
workers. It was kind of expensive on my little monitoring machine to
load it all each time the script is run. I went from about 90%
utilization to about 3% when I put it behind merb.

I'll eventually add a web front-end interface to it so I can edit the
different checks and who gets alerted and so on, from the app itself.
Maybe put up some dashboards or make graphs off the data. But that's
later.

 

[John Joyce]

I'm not actively enough working with it, but check out Gosu.
It's a Ruby game library, but can easily be a GUI tool too.
Hardware accelerated 2D stuff!

Heck, I'd challenge everyone out there to begin a Ruby GUI building
tool built with Ruby.
Cross-platform gets extra points.
Binding to existing GUI libs gets points too.
But to have it GUI'd app for building GUI's in Ruby!

 

[Xavier Noria]

Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
out. Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
on in Ruby that doesn't Rails?

My company (ASPgems) is Ruby-based. Most projects are web, but some
projects are batch processes, data munging, inter-application gluing,
crawling, web services.... There has been excepcionally some Perl but
almost everything is Ruby.

-- fxn