This Week in Ruby (July 26, 2008)

This is the 13th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails.

JRuby 1.1.3 has been released. This version includes several bug fixes and major speed and memory improvements.
Satish Talim of RubyLearning has announced a new course dedicated to the subject, and also interviewed Charles Nutter for the occasion, who provided some suggestions for RubyLearning participants. This week, Satish also interviewed Guy Naor, the CTO of Morph Labs, a prominent cloud computing Rails hosting company.

On the .NET side, things are moving just as quickly. Some great news emerged from OSCON 2008 regarding IronRuby, including the first binary release and the setting up of a project called ironruby-contrib on GitHub. This already includes the Rails plugin for Silverlight. Meanwhile, Peter Cooper published a great set of IronRuby tutorials to bring C# developers into the Ruby fold.

In the alternative framework world, Mack Framework 0.6 was released, which includes DataMapper 0.9.2 and RSpec support, transactional tests, internationalization and other improvements. The roadmap to Merb 1.0 was also posted on the official blog.

I had previously mentioned a few well known issues with Ruby and XML. Well, it appears that there is hope regarding a libxml-ruby resurrection after all. RedCloth 4 was also released this week.

Two interesting articles were: Don’t forget about RubyForge, which covers the issue of mass migration towards GitHub, and Modules underuse by Jay Fields.

Toronto’s sponsor-less conference RubyFringe is over and according to its participants it was fantastic. I truly regret not being able to participate in it. For those who were there, feel free to share your opinions in the comment section.

One last thing before you go; I must give my “caught-red-handed Ruby Community award” this week to Thiyagarajan Veluchamy. This dude thought it was a good idea to lift the entire content of one of my most popular articles from more than a year ago, even hotlinking the image, and then attributing the post to himself. Did he really think that no one would notice? Its link became popular on Del.icio.us for the Rails tag, and I got all sorts of emails from people who recognized my old (and now somewhat outdated) article. After a brief investigation, it turns out that Thiyagarajan has a habit of stealing content. Other articles appear to be copied verbatim from various blogs. Thiyagarajan, a word of advice, gathering inspiration from a certain post is fine, copying it is not. Especially if you try to pull it off by copying from someone who reports on the most interesting and popular posts in the community. That’s just a really dumb move.

To keep the good times rolling, the fourth edition of This Week in Rails is available on the official Rails blog.

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3 Comments

  1. Hongli Lai July 26, 2008
  2. malcontent July 27, 2008
  3. Antonio Cangiano August 7, 2008

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