T
Tim Sutherland
Links are at http://www.rubyweeklynews.org/20070304.html.
Ruby Weekly News 26th February - 4th March 2007
===============================================
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to you
this week by Tim Sutherland (email firstname.lastname at gmail.com),
with contributions from Robert Postill.
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* CVS services will be permanently unavailable
----------------------------------------------
Shugo Maeda announced that the Ruby interpreter's CVS repositories
will be no longer be available. "The source code repositry has been
moved to SVN."
This is unrelated to rubyforge CVS services.
* Ruby-doc.org search for your browser toolbar
----------------------------------------------
James Britt recently added a new search feature to ruby-doc.org, and
it soon became even better:
* Erlang book is in beta...
---------------------------
"We were lucky to get Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of Erlang,
to write our latest beta book, Programming Erlang", wrote Dave Thomas.
There were many excited responses, and also questions about the
possibility of books on other interesting programming languages. Dave
said he'd love to publish books on IO, Haskell, OCaml, etc.
"It's a question of finding the right author."
* rb-appscript developments (Ruby-AppleScript)
----------------------------------------------
Has noted that "a great introduction to rb-appscript at O'Reilly's
MacDevCenter" was just written by the author of "AppleScript: The
Definitive Guide", Matt Neuburg.
In a related thread, Laurent Sansonetti announced RubyOSA 0.3.0.
"RubyOSA is a bridge that connects Ruby to the Apple Event Manager
infrastructure. In big words, it allows you to do in Ruby what you
could do in AppleScript."
Among other new features, it is now possible to script remote
machines.
User Group News
===============
* Munich.rb meets on Thursday 15th March
----------------------------------------
The Munich.rb group are meeting on Thursday 15th March. Urban Hafner
will be wearing his Munich.rb T-Shirt, "but I guess a group like that
will likely stand out anyway
".
* Swiss Ruby User Group Meeting on 1.3.2007
-------------------------------------------
The SwissRUB met on March 1st, in Zürich.
* South East Michigan Ruby Brigade Meeting
------------------------------------------
The South East Michigan Ruby Brigade had a meeting on March 5th, with
free pizza, soft drinks, books, and friendly people, announced Patrick
Hurley.
Threads
=======
Making Ruby faster with Judy
----------------------------
Tomasz Wegrzanowski improved the performance of the Ruby interpreter by
using the Judy sparse-array library to replace some of Ruby's internal
hash tables.
These tables are used for example to do method lookups. Performance
increased by about 5%, and memory usage dropped by 4%.
Mauricio Fernandez said he'd done a similar thing back in 2002. The
biggest problem was that Judy is under the LGPL, which has more
restrictions than Ruby's license.
win32::changenotify and multiple events
---------------------------------------
Martin DeMello asked how to get win32::changenotify to capture multiple
events when e.g. "mkdir -p a/b/c" is executed.
There were not yet any replies.
is there something method in ruby like python's reduce()
--------------------------------------------------------
Huang Huangliang wanted to know if Ruby has a standard method that's
similar to Python's "reduce", i.e. to turn an array of values into a
single value, by repeatedly applying a function (block) of two arguments.
This is sometimes called "accumulate", "fold" or "inject" in different
programming languages.
Bira said, yes, it's Enumerable#inject in Ruby, and gave several good
examples of its use, with the simplest being
# Sum some numbers
(5..10).inject {|sum, n| sum + n } #=> 45
The name "inject" came to Ruby via the Smalltalk programming language.
(Your editor finds it easier to think "accumulate" whenever he sees
"inject". Your mileage may vary.)
Ruby and COM
------------
"Does anyone know of a stable Ruby-COM bridge which will let one do things
like importing DLLs, querying for interfaces and calling their methods?"
queried 11×22.
Robert Klemme linked to a page of Ruby win32 libraries, and Patrick Hurley
suggested using the standard Ruby libraries Win32OLE (for calling COM
interfaces) and DL (for calling functions in a DLL directly).
New Releases
============
Holy Telephony Batman! It's Batphone 0.1.0
------------------------------------------
Hans Fugal: "Does the world need yet another Ruby Asterisk Gateway
Interface library? Does the world need a guy who dresses up like a bat?"
This one was written to be easy to learn and use.
Ruby In Steel Personal Edition v 1.0
------------------------------------
Huw Collingbourne announced that Ruby in Steel has got to version one. It
is "a Ruby editing and debugging environment for Microsoft's Visual Studio
2005".
sapnwrfc next Generation RFC Connector for SAP NetWeaver
--------------------------------------------------------
Piers Harding announced the first "next generation" Ruby RFC connector for
SAP NetWeaver.
"SAP have undertaken a redevelopment of the RFC connection libraries, and
as a result the new Ruby Connector is now unicode enabled, and can handle
complex parameter types."
Other releases
Ruby Weekly News 26th February - 4th March 2007
===============================================
Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk
mailing list / the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup / Ruby forum, brought to you
this week by Tim Sutherland (email firstname.lastname at gmail.com),
with contributions from Robert Postill.
Articles and Announcements
==========================
* CVS services will be permanently unavailable
----------------------------------------------
Shugo Maeda announced that the Ruby interpreter's CVS repositories
will be no longer be available. "The source code repositry has been
moved to SVN."
This is unrelated to rubyforge CVS services.
* Ruby-doc.org search for your browser toolbar
----------------------------------------------
James Britt recently added a new search feature to ruby-doc.org, and
it soon became even better:
* Erlang book is in beta...
---------------------------
"We were lucky to get Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of Erlang,
to write our latest beta book, Programming Erlang", wrote Dave Thomas.
There were many excited responses, and also questions about the
possibility of books on other interesting programming languages. Dave
said he'd love to publish books on IO, Haskell, OCaml, etc.
"It's a question of finding the right author."
* rb-appscript developments (Ruby-AppleScript)
----------------------------------------------
Has noted that "a great introduction to rb-appscript at O'Reilly's
MacDevCenter" was just written by the author of "AppleScript: The
Definitive Guide", Matt Neuburg.
In a related thread, Laurent Sansonetti announced RubyOSA 0.3.0.
"RubyOSA is a bridge that connects Ruby to the Apple Event Manager
infrastructure. In big words, it allows you to do in Ruby what you
could do in AppleScript."
Among other new features, it is now possible to script remote
machines.
User Group News
===============
* Munich.rb meets on Thursday 15th March
----------------------------------------
The Munich.rb group are meeting on Thursday 15th March. Urban Hafner
will be wearing his Munich.rb T-Shirt, "but I guess a group like that
will likely stand out anyway
".* Swiss Ruby User Group Meeting on 1.3.2007
-------------------------------------------
The SwissRUB met on March 1st, in Zürich.
* South East Michigan Ruby Brigade Meeting
------------------------------------------
The South East Michigan Ruby Brigade had a meeting on March 5th, with
free pizza, soft drinks, books, and friendly people, announced Patrick
Hurley.
Threads
=======
Making Ruby faster with Judy
----------------------------
Tomasz Wegrzanowski improved the performance of the Ruby interpreter by
using the Judy sparse-array library to replace some of Ruby's internal
hash tables.
These tables are used for example to do method lookups. Performance
increased by about 5%, and memory usage dropped by 4%.
Mauricio Fernandez said he'd done a similar thing back in 2002. The
biggest problem was that Judy is under the LGPL, which has more
restrictions than Ruby's license.
win32::changenotify and multiple events
---------------------------------------
Martin DeMello asked how to get win32::changenotify to capture multiple
events when e.g. "mkdir -p a/b/c" is executed.
There were not yet any replies.
is there something method in ruby like python's reduce()
--------------------------------------------------------
Huang Huangliang wanted to know if Ruby has a standard method that's
similar to Python's "reduce", i.e. to turn an array of values into a
single value, by repeatedly applying a function (block) of two arguments.
This is sometimes called "accumulate", "fold" or "inject" in different
programming languages.
Bira said, yes, it's Enumerable#inject in Ruby, and gave several good
examples of its use, with the simplest being
# Sum some numbers
(5..10).inject {|sum, n| sum + n } #=> 45
The name "inject" came to Ruby via the Smalltalk programming language.
(Your editor finds it easier to think "accumulate" whenever he sees
"inject". Your mileage may vary.)
Ruby and COM
------------
"Does anyone know of a stable Ruby-COM bridge which will let one do things
like importing DLLs, querying for interfaces and calling their methods?"
queried 11×22.
Robert Klemme linked to a page of Ruby win32 libraries, and Patrick Hurley
suggested using the standard Ruby libraries Win32OLE (for calling COM
interfaces) and DL (for calling functions in a DLL directly).
New Releases
============
Holy Telephony Batman! It's Batphone 0.1.0
------------------------------------------
Hans Fugal: "Does the world need yet another Ruby Asterisk Gateway
Interface library? Does the world need a guy who dresses up like a bat?"
This one was written to be easy to learn and use.
Ruby In Steel Personal Edition v 1.0
------------------------------------
Huw Collingbourne announced that Ruby in Steel has got to version one. It
is "a Ruby editing and debugging environment for Microsoft's Visual Studio
2005".
sapnwrfc next Generation RFC Connector for SAP NetWeaver
--------------------------------------------------------
Piers Harding announced the first "next generation" Ruby RFC connector for
SAP NetWeaver.
"SAP have undertaken a redevelopment of the RFC connection libraries, and
as a result the new Ruby Connector is now unicode enabled, and can handle
complex parameter types."
Other releases