What was YOUR first Ruby Project

[J. Cooper]

I have written many snippets and fell in love with the language but I
have been absolutely unsuccessful at writing a usable program. I write
programs in Delphi and more recently in Java, but I always have a UI to
work with in one form or another (no pun intended). Putting Ruby
snippets together into something usable has turned out to be impossible
for me. I am clearly missing something visceral but there it is. As
much as I adore the fabulous language, to that extent I am disappointed
that I cannot use it for anything. Very sad but there it is.

Depends on what you write programs for! I started with Rails, and
obviously there are other web frameworks out there, so you have plenty
of chances to write stuff in that realm.

I don't actually use Rails anymore though. I currently use Ruby for
utility scripts, image manipulation with RMagick, and I'm even writing a
game in it using Ruby Gosu.

You may enjoy trying out JRuby and using NetBeans and Monkey Bars to
harness Java's UI building capabilities, but still get to do the actual
code in Ruby.

 

[Ragunathan Pattabiraman]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

I remember it was when google started open source hosting (google code).
Me and my brother were curious to try it out. Earlier he came up with
his own algorithm for the famous towers of hanoi puzzle. We named it as
non-recursive-humane-algorithm. I was toying with Ruby. So I implemented
his algorithm in Ruby and posted it at google code.

It is not so Rubyish. I now see I was basically using Ruby syntax to my
c++ style implementation.

It is still available at http://towersofhanoi.googlecode.com. (No unit
tests. You have been warned!)

Cheers,
Ragu

 

[Jeremy Hinegardner]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

Back in 2002/3 I was working on WebSphere based projects and I since I had been
playing around Ruby for a while on the side, I thought it was skunkworks time.

I wrote a Java code generator that took meta data in a YAML file and some JSP
layouts to generate final JSP's. In the same projects I used ruby to
interrogate the DB2 meta table information (via the commandline tools) to
generate Java DAO classes and all the SQL used to do crud operations on those
tables.

I think less than a year after that 'Code Generation in Action' by Jack
Herrington came out.

enjoy,

-jeremy

 

[khaines]

I'm late to the party, but I thought I'd answer this one.

My first real Ruby project was internshipsmilwaukee.com, back in the
spring of 2002. This was a job site aimed at putting college students
looking for internships together with companies offering internships. It
was implemented using a version of IOWA 0.14 that I had modified to make
it usable for a real site.


Kirk Haines

 

[Bob Batzinger]

My first project was a database engine project for a graduate course in
database server design. It was pure delight to build the classes and
extend them as the term progress. The testing facility of the language
became an excellent way to ensure that all enhancements to the system
did not break anything.

However, I was stung and disappointed when I came to the part of
interfacing my db engine to older protocols. I discovered that the DBI
interface was not as mature as I had thought it was and much of the
documentation online was in a form of Japanese that could not be easily
understood using Babelfish. ;-)

 

[Tim Pease]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

I wrote the Logging gem as a replacement for the orphaned Log4r
project. They laughed at me, but three people are using it now (two if
you don't count my Mom [thanks Mom!]). This was waaaay back in 2006.
Man, that seems like only two years ago!

<http://github.com/TwP/logging/tree/master>
<http://logging.rubyforge.org/>


Blessings,
TwP