Green Ruby Programmer

Ruby support in NetBeans

2010-03-01T07:12:00.002-05:00

I just downloaded the latest version of NetBeans. Version 3.8, that is. It has support for Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, and C++. So I might have to start getting back into Ruby programming.

Ruby podcasts in iTunes store

2010-02-07T18:51:00.000-05:00

If you want to learn more about Ruby, there are some podcasts about it in the iTMS.

Ruby seems out of the spotlight this year

2010-01-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

I only know of two Ruby projects that garnered much attention last year: Twitter, which gets a lot of buzz, and RubyCocoa which is still a work-in-progress but will hopefully get completed in the next year or two.

I have been focusing my programming skill enhancement efforts this year in Objective-C/Cocoa programming and extending my abilities to adjuncts to the Java EE standard. Products in those two areas look like they will get the most attention from software product customers this year.

Consequently, I have not been doing a lot with Ruby lately.

Python support in NetBeans 3.8

2009-12-11T10:48:00.001-05:00

Sun has just released NetBeans 3.8, a new version of a popular Java IDE. NetBeans IDE includes support for lots of programming languages besides Java - among them, Python!

probably not doing more Ruby programming this year

2009-11-21T19:01:00.002-05:00

I am pretty busy right now. I like to be learning new things in my spare time so I am prepared for the next big wave.

Ruby got a lot of buzz and I do think it is a good fit for some types of programming. Java seems to get better performance and has more error checking. Java programs compile much faster than C++ programs did back in the 1990's when Ruby was invented.

The relative advantages of being an interpreted language like Ruby have somewhat declined. The importance of having a program checked as much as possible before executing remains quite high for production environments: web, enterprise system, etc.

My current area of interest and study is Mac programming: Objective-C and the Cocoa framework.

I am already quite good at Java 6 and all the versions that came before it. Native Macintosh programs have capabilities that are quite unique compared to portable Java programs and Windows, Linux, and Unix programs.

Macs are where GUI software was first served up to the masses, and the Mac and its spin-off NeXT are what gave birth to the web about two decades ago. I want to see just how far this platform can go, and take advantage of its strengths. I can program it with Ruby, Python, Java, etc. and I have. Now, I want to move on and program it with its own native tools, languages, and frameworks.

Ruby + NetBeans = Ruby IDE

2008-11-27T19:02:00.003-05:00

NetBeans support for Ruby development has been around a pretty long time.

Sun's Java developers have had a non-grudging admiration for Ruby on Rails for years.

They liked it so much, in fact, that Sun bought up the JRuby effort.

The NetBeans 6.x IDE can support JRuby (Ruby running on Java VM) or regular Ruby development.

In the blog post NetBeans + Ruby = true you can see that NetBeans has had some support for Ruby for over a couple of years.

What is really exciting about Ruby support in NetBeans today is not that it simply exists but how much support for Ruby is in NetBeans now. Rails development, Gems - all that stuff that Ruby programmers take for granted but maybe would not expect to see in a Java-hosted IDE.

Nevertheless, it is there. Sun's employees/contributors have gone way beyond just adding a checkmark for the Ruby feature in the NetBeans IDE.

I have not written any Ruby code in several months

2007-03-18T15:59:00.000-04:00

I really have not written or looked at any Ruby programs since late last year.

I feel a little uneasy with that because it is such a potent language. I am sure I do not want to get rusty at it, nor stall my on-going growth at using the language.

Any experienced, mature programmer should have Ruby and/or Python - or something like them - on their desktops.

No one programming language does all jobs well. Most programming languages have a set of things they do very well - better than most other languages can.

My gut instincts - call it intuition - tell me that Ruby is going to turn a new page and surge in popularity/mass-awareness next year sometime. I think 2008 is going to be the year that Ruby is recognized as a major hit.

I rather suspect that when that happens, the story will come out that 2006 and 2007 is when a lot of amazing Ruby programs got quietly deployed and took root.

Sun brings forth a new Ruby IDE from NetBeans

2006-12-01T01:46:00.000-05:00

Here is a pretty cool screenshot of a new Ruby IDE:

http://blogs.sun.com/tor/resource/ruby-editing.png

The post that describes what the picture means - which is just what it looks like it means - is here:

http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/netbeans_and_ruby_is_true

Sun is making huge strides in adding Ruby support to NetBeans, in part, because they hired the JRuby (Ruby in Java) developers a few months ago.

The Tor Norby weblog post entitled Welcome JRuby for details.

flexonrails.net

2006-10-04T20:45:00.000-04:00

Go over and look at flexonrails.net and you will see that Flex now has a way to work with Ruby On Rails.

Ruby on Rails handles the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) database stuff - and FLEX (Flash) handles the GUI (graphical user interface) stuff.

Interesting idea!

Technorati tags: flex, adobe, weblog, framework, programming, ruby, rubyonrails

Riding Rails: Sun hires the JRuby team

2006-10-04T20:42:00.000-04:00

Sun, which is about to launch JDK 1.6 and create a more comfortable working environment for Java / scripting-language hybrid applications/systems, just hired the JRuby team.

Riding Rails: Sun hires the JRuby team

JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written in Java. Same sort of idea as the Jython interpreter, which is an implementation of the Python language that is written in pure Java.

So, it looks like Ruby's stock just went up.

Technorati tags: ruby, jruby, sun, java

RadRails 0.7.1 Released

2006-09-19T07:27:00.000-04:00

A new version of the Ruby/Rails IDE, RadRails - which is based on the Eclipse IDE - came out a little less than a week ago.

RadRails 0.7.1 Released :

The latest version of RadRails, the Ruby on Rails IDE, 0.7.1, has been released for Windows, OS X and Linux.

I have not updated in a few months so I cannot say firsthand what this new release is like.

I have been pretty impressed with what has come out so far.

The team working on it is very small, just a couple guys, fresh from school.

They are working at an IBM research center now, in Zurich.

IBM was instrumental in giving Java a leg up into corporate enterprise environments while other companies were sill poo-pooing it.

Then IBM turned around and rolled out the free Eclipse IDE, which has revolutionized the Java programming industry.

Now they are throwing their weight behind an effort to help make the Eclipse IDE capable of not merely supporting Java, C/C++, Python, and a host of other languages - Ruby included. They are building up the Eclipse ability to support RAD of web/database applications using Ruby.

Technorati tags: rubyonrails, ruby, programming, eclipse, ide

Download Ruby

2006-09-19T07:20:00.000-04:00

Ruby 1.8.5 is out for Linux, MS-Windows, Mac OS X, and in source code form.

Ruby 1.8.5:

The current stable version is 1.8.5.

Ruby version 1.8.4 and Ruby on Rails will come preinstalled on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) when it comes out next year, the site says.

Technorati tags: ruby

Ruby Programming Language

2006-09-19T07:16:00.000-04:00

The official Ruby programming language website has been updated with a new look.

Ruby Programming Language:

As you can see the much anticipated redesign is now live. It was over a year ago that it was suggested that a visual identity team be formed for the purpose of redesigning the Ruby Web site.

It looks pretty good. I think they did a good job.

There is an attractive use of color, a nice-looking/handy sidebar, and some navigation tabs.

Technorati tags: ruby

Too busy to Ruby this month

2006-09-09T20:51:00.000-04:00

I have not even looked at a Ruby book since the beginning of August.

Here are my predictions for Ruby....

I am strongly convinced that Ruby has taken hold and will spread across the computer field like wildflowers over the course of 2006 and 2007.

In 2008, I predict there will be a SYS-CON magazine for Ruby and a whole bunch of books on how to do important kinds of computer programming in Ruby really quickly.

I doubt that Ruby will be any kind of a speed daemon in the next 2-3 years but it will probably happen by the end of this decade.

I had a little setback with my Rad Rails IDE a couple of months ago. After I got my Mac and it all configured with the latest Ruby and the latest Rails and some really cool gems, Rad Rails ability to update itself broke. Since then there have been several updates. I have not gotten them.

I am resigned to having to download Rad Rails and reinstall it all over again.

Given that I don't have any pressing need for Ruby and I am really busy at the moment, it seems likely I will push that exercise until the Fall.

Right now I have stuff to program in 5 computer languages Monday and none of them start with 'R'. Tomorrow, or next weekend, I need to do some stuff on my Mom's computer. She just bought a new Mac, and received an iPod Nano from me shortly after that. I have been doing a bit of tech support for her - setting things up and getting her acquainted.

Next month, I have the released of Firefox 2.0 to look forward to and celebrate. I want to flex my rusting XSLT skills because that will be really in demand.

I recently had my appreciation for JavaScript stimulated. There were a couple functions in the language I had never used before, and overlooked - and they turned out to be pretty cool.

I am looking at The Browser in a whole new light. Not just as a necessity but as the easiest platform to program for some things.

I already have lots of books on the web (HTML, XML, XSLT, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript) but most are from the late 1990s. I recently freshened up my collection. Now it covers 2006 standards quite admirably.

I am really amazed at how quickly web programming libraries and the still-vital web browsers out there have advanced in the past two years.

Even in 2002, I think people were still looking at a lot of things promised for the web that were still just all potential - not realized in products yet. Well, this year, that has all changed. The stuff is here and it runs on all desktops.

Well, so as you can see - I have been pretty busy of late. Instead of things letting up, it looks like I am going to be up to my eyeballs in things to do until November.

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

2006-08-14T02:07:00.000-04:00

Wow, pretty amazing. Apple has decided to include Ruby On Rails with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). The version included will apparently be at least the current version 1.1 - but it might even be Ruby On Rails 1.2.

A pretty excited blog post came out last Monday from Ruby On Rail's author, David.

Riding Rails: Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard):

It%u2019s finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X (see %u201CInternet and Web%u201D). Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We%u2019ve been working with Apple for quite a while to make this happen and its great to finally be able to share it with the world. The love for Ruby has definitely spread inside Apple and we%u2019ve been thrilled to see the level of interest they%u2019ve taken to get OS X to be a premiere development and deployment platform for Rails.

I really did not hear much about Ruby until just before Rails came out. Half a decade ago I knew a Java programmer who was about to switch to Ruby programming.

He liked the fact it was an interpreted environment. Having done varying amounts of work in a language similar to MUMPS, VB, Python, Perl, and even a little Tcl - I could understand wanting to do some programming in an interpreted language.

But doing all of it in an interpreted language - I just could not see it at the time.

Interestingly enough, the evolution of both interpreted and compiled languages has sped up dramatically since our conversation.

Both have taken on styles and features that I never really expected them to get. At least not just a few years later.

Java now has generics, similar to the templates feature of C++ - at least in appearance and purpose - though not implementation.

Meanwhile, Python and Ruby grew their functional programming support, suddenly developed powerful object-oriented frameworks for rapid web/database application development, and got onto the radar maps of the industry. That got them a lot of respect.

Running behind the scenes at Yahoo, Google, Blogger, and the Washington Post has escaped most programmer's notice. But I think a lot of programmers have heard about the Django project, which is written in Python - and Ruby on Rails, which of course is written in Ruby.

Apple certainly has. They have included Ruby with their operating system for quite a while now. For several years at least, perhaps since the beginning of OSX - I am not sure if it has been that long however.

I do know that when I flip through a book about Ruby programming, at least four out of five times I am looking at screenshots of a Ruby program that were snapped on a Macintosh running Mac OS X - not some other brand of computer.

Now that Apple is bringing Ruby on Rails to sit at the head of the table alongside honored guest Java, maybe there will be 9 out of 10 Ruby articles sporting Mac screenshots.

Technorati tags: rubyonrails, ruby, macosx, apple, programming, software

Improvements to the layout/styling of this blog

2006-06-29T10:55:00.002-04:00

A couple of things that were the default way the template for this blog were not working well at all when I included snippets of code or documents.

Fortunately, I fixed that this morning by making some changes. I am gradually making these changes across all by blogs on Blogspot.com.

For one thing, I have added support for decorative dashed-line boxes around code snippets that I include. Normally, I make that a dashed blue line, because that seems to be a convention. Here I use a dashed green line, in keeping with the basic color scheme of this blog and its theme.

I also widened the blog. If you have an old 800x600 display, you are going to have to horizontally scroll a little to the right in order to see the whole sidebar. Sorry, but I want to be able to show source code for either documents or programs - and I needed to widen the body section of the blog by 200 pixels.

Last but not least, I am highlighting the Technorati tags area that is at the end of some of my posts with a nice little three-dimensional inlay effect. I think it looks pretty cool. It kind of indicates that these tags are metadata, not part of the actual content itself.

Hope you like these changes. My goal is to make the blog as readable as I can. I also want to really stretch my CSS skills as much as I can. The line between the disciplines used in programming, publishing, web design, and technical writing is really blurring in this era of the World Wide Web and the technologies it has spawned.

Programmers are having to become more multi-disciplined than ever. Personally, I am not trying to buck that trend.

Technorati Tags: blogging, css

Songs tagged as ruby on Last.fm

2006-06-20T23:46:00.000-04:00

Everyone needs music to inspire them.

We Ruby programmers are no different! We are men (and women) - not code monkeys.

Investigate some of the songs with a Ruby theme at Last.fm.

You need culture. You have not heard the last of it.

Take note.

Oh, dear.

I hope I have not opened a Pandora's Box.

Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005

2006-06-20T20:01:00.001-04:00

People that are invested in Visual Studio 2005 with their current projects, but find they also need to start developing software in Ruby - about about to catch a lucky break.

The Inside Ruby weblog reported on a new tool recently. It is called Ruby In Steel.

See the Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005 website for details.

I think I also read about a an Iron Ruby project or product out there somewhere that integrates Ruby with .NET. Not too sure though.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, mswin, ide, visualstudio, software

Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005

2006-06-20T20:01:00.000-04:00

People that are invested in Visual Studio 2005 with their current projects, but find they also need to start developing software in Ruby - about about to catch a lucky break.

The Inside Ruby weblog reported on a new tool recently. It is called Iron Ruby.

See the Sapphire In Steel :: Ruby Programming with Visual Studio 2005 website for details.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming, mswin, ide, visualstudio, software

hreview - Microformats

2006-06-16T13:56:00.000-04:00
As anyone who knows me can attest, I have a ton of books.

I was just reading about the new hReview Microformat and it really caught my interest.

Reviews, to me, are very handy. I use them to choose what products to buy, what software is worth trying out, what movies I want to see or rent.

Also, they can be a handy way to quickly select what books from my own collection I should look at when researching a particular topic. I am pretty good at remembering what is in what book. But a couple of times in the past several years, I have been surprised when a particular technology was thrown in as an example in a book I had not expected to delve into that subject.

I own four Ruby books at this point. I have my eye on one or two more. I have looked at several others at Borders and decided not to buy them. They just did bring add enough new knowledge to me in the case of the latter.

I also picked up a copy of the July 2006 Linux Journal the last time I was at the bookstore. I would like to write a reviews of that when I finish reading it. It is a pretty fascinating issue for someone who is into Ruby programming.

Microformats:
hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.
Technorati tags: hReview, microformats, reviewing, metadata, xml, rss

Mondrian Ruby IDE

2006-06-16T11:03:00.000-04:00
There is another Ruby IDE out there. This one is called Mondrian Ruby IDE.

Mondrian is built on top of the SciTE framework, which is designed to support programming-language aware text editors. The Ruby code uses the FOX GUI toolkit.

Mondrian's Ruby-specific editing logic is written in Ruby itself.

The authors admit this does cause it to run slowly when loading a large Ruby programming. But they point out that the process of editing a Ruby program is pretty lag-free, after that initial delay for loading.

They also call attention to the fact it runs identically on MS-Windows and Linux.

A couple interesting wrinkles to this tool:
UML designer
dynamic object browser

Features like these, just five years ago, would boost the price of a C++ IDE from the below $500 price range to a lofty thousand to two thousand dollar price range.

Programming tools have taken a huge turn for the better in the past decade. A lot of this seems to have sprung forth from two things:

Apple's ushering-in of object-oriented and GUI-style programming a quarter of a decade ago, with the Apple Lisa and then the Apple Macintosh
Richard M. Stallman's insistence over two decades ago that a lot of important software be written as free, open source software.

If those two things did not change the world of software-for-programmers more dramatically than anything else, I do not know what did.

Here is more info, from its home page:

Mondrian Ruby IDE:
Mondrian is a cross-platform project-manager and editor for the Ruby language. Written in
100% native Ruby using the FOX GUI toolkit, Mondrian has the familiar look and feel of a modern IDE
while remaining dedicated to the uniqueness of the Ruby language and its community.
Technorati tags: ruby, programming, software, uml, designing, oop

jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin mini-reviewed by bact

2006-06-16T10:39:00.000-04:00
Bact has blogged a screen shot of a pretty nice-looking Ruby plugin for jEdit in operation.

Go take a look at it here:

bact' is a name: jEdit Ruby Editor Plugin

I am pretty impressed with how far jEdit has come. About half a dozen years ago, it was a good text editor with an excellent architecture.

Now it is a massive, highly productive community of developers and plugins: far more than just a project or a piece of software. The power inside and polish on the outside of these plugins is really impressive.

Here is the Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit home page.

Technorati tags: ruby, programming

SQL On Rails demo screencast

2006-06-15T17:42:00.000-04:00
The SQL On Rails website is kind of a dig on the Ruby On Rails website, and the whole RoR phenomenon.

Poking fun at the numerous Ruby On Rails demo screencast QuickTime movies out there - this site includes its own: SQL On Rails demo screencast.

It is pretty hilarious.

You have to watch a bunch of RoR screencasts in order to get it. But if you have, then you will.

Take it with a grain of salt and try to have a sense of humor about it.

I have activated backlinks for this blog

2006-06-15T09:07:00.000-04:00
I have gotten one or two requests to activate backlinks. I did not realize at the time that Blogger/Blogspot added support for banklinks at the time. In fact, I barely knew What backlinks are and how they are used.

I was lucky with this weblog. With my oldest one I had to manually add backlink tags to my blog template. It was not too bad. However I do not really like mucking around in there for a few reasons.

Anyway, it is up and running so if someone wants to link to one of my posts, it is now possible to do so. Likewise, I can link to my own posts too - from other posts in the same or different weblogs.

By the way, I have been reading Blogging - Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone, published by New Riders.

It is about the best book someone could write about the Blogger/Blogspot weblogs. It covers a few other of the popular ones too.

This book covers everything from writing your first blog, to customizing your templates, adding CSS and Javascript, and even making money with your weblog.

I did not see backlinks in the book, which are a pretty new feature. The book is several years old, though. My impression is not a lot of stuff has changed in the past couple years, but the backlink thing is one new addition to those original Blogger features that were there when Google bought it.

Oh, mobile voice blogging is a new feature too. I kind of doubt that is in the book either. The rest of the features seem to get decent coverage.

Technorati Weblog: Introducing Microformats Search and Pingerati

2006-06-09T14:11:00.000-04:00
Technorati announced some pretty exciting developments on their weblog just over a week ago, on May 31.

The big news is that they have added support for Microformats. Microformats included metadata about the information contained in a document, or entry in a document, directly into the internals of the document itself.

While obviously, this further mixes content with presentation to a certain degree, it is sort of a special case. The information itself, is generally not so much data as metadata. It describes the content, it is not the content per se. Further, what it really does is provide context about that content.

It is knowledge of that context that Technorati, the popular blog indexing/searching/tagging service, has now been enabled to read and exploit for the benefit of its readers. That in turn, will be a big help to the authors of the blogs it harnesses.

This assumes their goal is to either become popular, which being helpful to a readership certainly does - or if they just want to be able to organize their own writing for their own use.

After all, many weblogs are simply journals in the diary sense, not in the publications sense.

Speaking of context, this is taking place in front of the backdrop of the development of Firefox 2.0. That version, expected out later this year, will introduce a feature called Microsummaries.

Microsummaries will scrape the content and or anything else in the page, including information in Microformats, and display it in a consolidated presentation in the browser. This will save browser users from a lot of hunting around and possibly even math or sorting effort. Other uses will probably arise too.

Technorati Weblog:
This afternoon Technorati introduces a technology preview of microformats search for contacts, events, and reviews. Available now in the Technorati Kitchen, I invite you to come take a look at this first of a kind realtime microformats search engine, see what the team has worked very hard to build for you, and let us know what you think and what you want from microformats search.

If you are (or will be) publishing with microformats in your blog, and you're already pinging Technorati, then you are all set. Our new microformats search will index your microformats.
Technorati tags: microformats, xml, blogging, searching, metadata, technorati

IBM plays XML card in effort to beat Oracle - Builder UK

2006-06-09T13:49:00.000-04:00
IBM is putting some muscle behind its SOA philosophy this month.

The company just made an announcement about the new version of DB2, version 9.

It sports better integration with the IBM WebSphere server, which is based on the popular open source web server from Apache. It adds XML support.

And, it introduces close integration of Ruby on Rails.

That sounds reminiscent of the successful efforts by IBM, Oracle, and other companies to add Java integration into their servers, ushering in the golden age of application servers.
ZDNet UK Builder:
Formerly code-named Viper, the XML capabilities will greatly improve the speed of applications that use XML, he said. "There are 68 patents alone in Viper, and it involved 750 developers over five years," Picciano said. "This is something no one else has and will take years to get here."
DB2 9 will also have a storage mechanism, enabling corporations to reduce their hardware storage needs by about 40 percent, he said. The data server will be optimised to run with SAP's packaged applications and have close integration with Ruby on Rails, Picciano said. He predicted the release will lure in Oracle customers and defend IBM from open-source alternatives, which are increasingly viable for corporate customers.
Technorati tags: ibm, db2, sql, soa, rubyonrails, xml, database

Linking to Ruby books to find them at local libraries

2006-06-03T09:40:00.000-04:00
There is a neat website called WorldCat that web pages can hyperlink to for information on a given book.

The benefits of doing this is that the page linked to will provide the user with quick access to the local library catalog information on that particular book.

While many pages on the web will provide links to sites where the user can buy a book, this

The best, not to mention most comprehensive, book I own on the Ruby programming language is Programming Ruby, 2nd ed. by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt (ISBN: 0974514055).

The URL for the book at Worldwide Library Cooperative is:

http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0974514055

The syntax of this URL is very simple:

http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/ISBN_number

Here is a URL that links to the 1st edition of the book Agile Web Development with Rails:

http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0-9766940-0-X

Generated web pages could easily embed these links for books that are cited in the text.

Some Wikis allow defining custom tags which get translated to URLs. They support string substitution of parameters passed to the markdown tags into a position indicated by a placeholder in a URL template. If they do, a markdown tag named something like LibraryBook could be defined.

There is a web page with more information on how to Link directly to an ISBN/ISSN in Open WorldCat

In the meantime, you can see if the books above are at your local library!

RadRails site came back up last week

2006-05-30T23:01:00.000-04:00
The RadRails website was only down for a couple days. It has been up since around the latter half of last week.

I blogged something about it the day it came up, but that post got stuck in my blogging client somehow and never made it here.

I was finally able to see the plugins list show up last week. It is a pretty neat feature to have in RadRails GUI. I am really impressed with that that team has pulled off. Even more amazingly, I think they are in school too,

And the upside of that is - they hopefully have the summer off. So more code, more often - maybe.

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE

2006-05-24T14:02:00.000-04:00
The website for the excellent RadRails Ruby On Rails Eclipse-based IDE is back up today.

Technorati tags: ruby, eclipse, programming

99 bottles of (ruby-colored) beer on the wall

2006-05-23T19:22:00.000-04:00
I wanted to create a really simple web page with Ruby On Rails.

I have been using HTML for about a dozen years. I have been doing some Ruby programming off and on for the past 6 months or so. I wanted to put the two together in an RHTML page.

Here is what I generated:
4 bottles of beer on the wall, 4 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - 3 bottles of beer on the wall. 3 bottles of beer on the wall, 3 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - 2 bottles of beer on the wall. 2 bottles of beer on the wall, 2 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - 1 bottles of beer on the wall. 1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer. Take one down, pass it around - no more bottles of beer on the wall.

Turned out to be pretty easy to coax my server to display this output. Other than zombie-drone work typing in the HTML and the non-varying parts of the text, all I did was read the parameter and execute a loop - using Ruby.

Here is the HTML that makes that web page show up:
<html> <head> <title>Beer Song in Ruby On Rails</title> </head> <body> <pre> 4 bottles of beer on the wall, 4 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - 3 bottles of beer on the wall. 3 bottles of beer on the wall, 3 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - 2 bottles of beer on the wall. 2 bottles of beer on the wall, 2 bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - 1 bottles of beer on the wall. 1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer. Take one down, pass it around - no more bottles of beer on the wall. </pre> </body> </html>

That is the goal actually, not the solution to the problem.

The whole solution is just about fifteen lines of RHTML, most of which is plain, old HTML.

The interesting part that generates the portion of the page that actually executes multiple times - and handles changing the text each pass through the loop - is here:

<% start = params[:start].to_i %><% start = 99 unless start!=0 %> <pre> <% start.downto(2) do |bottles| %> <%= bottles %> bottles of beer on the wall, <%= bottles %> bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around - <%= bottles-1 %> bottles of beer on the wall. <% end %>

I made a couple mistakes as I put this together.
Tried using the pound-sign/braces formatting trick that works in all Ruby double quoted literals.
Tried using a more terse expression to set the default value of the start variable.

As you can see, neither of these things required a complicated fix.

Kicking it off was a piece of cake. The URL looks like this:

http://www.yourhost.com/beer_song/sing?start=4

The need to have a start parameter instead of just hardcoding the value 99 as the loop count is dubious, I admit.

I forced that requirement in so I would have to read a parameter from the request and use its value in my view. Plus, I wanted to be able to have sample output that would not require 20 pages of output!

As I worked myself through these little self-generated exercises, I of course generated a couple application errors along the way. That was quite useful, actually.

I was impressed by the quality of the error messages. To me, an error message has to tell the person reading it what they are supposed to do - if anything - to fix the problem (or help get it fixed). Rails error message was great. I am the developer. It gave me a nice stack trace.

My next task is to create a few tables in an SQL database. Then I can have a page that modifies and displays these values in a web page.

I have a couple of useful applications in mind. So after I get these newbie etudes out of the way, I can move on to them.

At that point I will be checking off a lot of things on my personal TODO lists.

Technorati Tags:
rubyonrails,
rhtml,
ruby,
programming

RadRails website is down

2006-05-23T18:32:00.000-04:00
I tried to get to the Rad Rails site (www.radrails.org and plugins.radrails.org) today and cannot. It is broken.

www.radrails.org: Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html

Technorati Tags:
rubyonrails

RadRails 0.6.3 and getting my Ruby/Rails house in order on my Mac really helped

2006-05-15T21:33:00.000-04:00
As I mentioned last week, I was experiencing a few new problems after upgrading to RailsRails 0.6.2

It looks like problems were coming at me from several difference sources. Here are at least a couple of them.

regression bug in RadRails 0.6.2 which caused context-assist (control+space auto-completion) to fail
my failure to define an up-to-date Ruby On Rails and Ruby environment outside of the RadRails IDE

Before, I was completely relying on a Rails bundle within Locomotive for to provide the environment for Creating a Rails application environment.

I think I remember hearing that RadRails needs an external environment defined which includes Ruby On Rails and Rails. And, it needs an up-to–date one as well.

Fortunately, I recently spotted an extremely useful tutorial on using Mac OS X for developing Rails applications by Apple Computer.

The tutorial included a link to a wonderful page containing step-by-step instructions for Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. It was complete, and it results in the latest versions of all the programs Ruby On Rails needs, including itself, being installed in /usr/local. That was precisely what I wanted to do!

So this weekend, I did that. The process went smoothly.

Afterwards, I launched RadRails (0.6.2) and told it where these things were. It got much happier. It was still not quite itself - but very close. That was where I left things last night (Sunday).

This evening, I updated RadRails from version 0.6.2 to 0.6.3. This is now a piece of cake, thanks to the RadRails team using the Eclipse update feature. It probably made their builds a little more complicated. However, it sure makes life nice for us RadRails users!

Things in the IDE seem pretty close to working the way the RadRails guys intended now.

My hat is off to: Apple, Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic, the RadRails team, and the Eclipse developers.

If you are doing Ruby On Rails development on a Macintosh - and you are having some problems with your environment or running the right commands - visit the pages I cited and you will get yourself quickly unstuck.

RadRails releases 0.6.3 thus quashing its content-assist regression

2006-05-15T18:26:00.000-04:00
People noticed that the content assist feature of RadRails was broken in version 0.6.2.

Last week, RadRails 0.6.3 was released - fixing this bug.

Technorati Tags:
programming, ruby, rubyonrails, software

Invoking Yahoo Search Services from Ruby

2006-05-14T16:42:00.000-04:00
Looking for a way to access Yahoo Search web services from Ruby programs?

Premshree Pillai has written a very clean-looking Ruby API for Yahoo! Search Web Services.

It is published in a syntax-colored, pretty-printed programming listing on a Plone content management system (CMS).

Plone is written in Python. Python and Ruby are somewhat programming language rivals.

So it is kind of funny to see such a powerful, useful Ruby program hanging out on a Plone server.

I really have to hand it to Premshree. This is a very clean piece of programming.

The program, which was written in mid-2005, has no dependencies on any software that is not included in the standard Ruby 1.8 distribution. That means it can be used without any hassle at all.

The search functionality is implemented in a 2-layer hierarchy of classes. They are:
Search class with the generic mechanisms common to all the searches
Specific class for each different concrete search type

This is an excellent demonstration of the use of inheritance as a practical way to approach specialization in object-oriented programs.

Here are the classes that Premshree has defined for the specific types of searches on Yahoo:
ImagesSearch
NewsSearch
RelatedSuggestion
RelatedTags (My Web)
SpellingSuggestion
TagSearch (My Web)
UrlSearch (My Web)
VideoSearch
WebSearch

All requests are sent using the simple REST protocol that Yahoo has defined for their services.

Here is an example of the easy-to-use API being told to carry out a search for videos on the subject of ruby.

# assume that MY_APP_ID has been set to your Yahoo application ID video_search = VideoSearch.new(MY_APP_ID, 'ruby') ruby_movies_dict = video_search.parse_results

The ruby_movies_dict will contain a hash with the results from the search in it. Simple!

The only flaw with it that I can see is that there are no RDoc comments included for the methods.

The classes have obvious purpose from their names and their superclasses.

However, the methods would really benefit from a sample piece of code, demonstrating an actual call to them - and sample results that could be returned from that call.

That would eliminate any questions about what to do with whatever comes back. Of course, one could simply look at the documentation over at the Yahoo Developer web site, which spells out the format all of all XML data returned by each service.

The results returned vary a little from service to service. So one should be visiting that site for the info anyway. Still, shortcuts to enlightenment by the author of a reusable piece of code are always appreciated.

I think it is a Ruby programming work of art!

Technorati Tags:
programming, ruby, software, yahoo, searching

RadRails 0.6.2

2006-05-10T19:34:00.000-04:00
I have been using the stand alone version of RadRails for a while now.

I had some problems with RadRails 0.6.1. Hoping that the RadRails 0.6.2 release that came out a month ago would solve them, I upgraded to this newer version of it today.

Instead, the problems seem to have gotten worse. Well, I am having more problems than I did before - so it seems worse to me.

Trac on the RadRails site tells a pretty glowing tale of a piece of software with no major problems.

I have a bunch of things I am trying to get done before I go to bed tonight. So I decided to put it aside until at least tomorrow.

Chances are I will come act it with a completely different tact when I try again. That should let me get maximum discernment on the cause of the problem - without going around in circles doing/undoing things. Instead, I plan to download/run it in a completely different environment with a clean install - and see if that helps.

At this point, I have more faith in the software itself than my configuration of the software. So that is the angle I am going to be hitting it hard on tomorrow.

sidebar for this blog updated

2006-05-09T21:10:00.000-04:00
I updated the sidebar of this weblog tonight. So if you are a still finding out where important/useful things for Ruby programmers are located on the web, take a look. It should help.

Yahoo Answers can get you quick answers to Ruby questions

2006-05-07T19:34:00.000-04:00
Yahoo Answers has been up and running for over several months now.

The site can be very helpful when you have a programming question and want to bounce it off of someone else at 2 a.m. your time, or whenever.

There always seem to be people on the site.

Here is the section for Programming and Design questions.

There is an RSS feed for Programming and Design questions and answers too.

Note that another website which you can get a surprising amount of information from is Wikipedia.

When you think of casting about for some quick answers to some software question, the last thing you are generally going to try to lay your hands on is an encyclopedia.

That is probably because in the past, the set of encyclopedias you had in your house was 10 to 15 years old, and was hardly up to the minute or comprehensive when it came to computers and software.

Happily, things have changed - at least for Wikipedia readers!

So, when you get stuck - do not be afraid to ask for help or.... check out what the Wikipedia can tell you.

Ruby Programming Group on Yahoo Groups

2006-05-07T04:46:00.000-04:00
There is a new Ruby Programming Group that has just recently started up over at Yahoo Groups.

So far, it looks like there are just some links to some useful web sites and some surveys. Looks like soon there will by a Ruby programming FAQ and a little repository of Ruby one-liners.

HOW-TO: Configure eclipse for Ruby on Rails

2006-05-05T18:29:00.000-04:00
Sonjaya Tandon in her recent HOW-TO: Configure eclipse for Ruby on Rails says:

In this guide, I will go over how to configure Eclipse for Ruby on Rails. In the next one, I will go over setting up a simple project.

She points out two prerequisites in this fantastic, step-by-step, screenshot-laden tutorial:
Make sure you are using Eclipse 3.1
Make sure you have Ruby On Rails (and Ruby) already installed before you begin.

Some people have gotten burned by not heeding prerequisite number two... !

If you do not have Rails installed, you cannot configure Eclipse to use it. Then, major Rails related things are not going to be working - and you will be confused! The same holds true for having Ruby itself installed beforehand too.

Of course, there is a simpler way to get going with Rails development. You can simply download RadRails IDE, which is itself based on Eclipse IDE, and start using it right away. Again, make sure you have your prerequisite software installed before you run the application.

For now, I am simply using RadRails on my Macintosh.

Sonjaya Tandon » Hooked on Rails

2006-05-05T17:36:00.000-04:00
Sonjaya Tandon::
I STRONGLY recommend anyone serious about software development to get this up and running on your development machines. Even if you don’t plan to develop your deployment applications on Rails there are simply too many good ideas that it captures to ignore it. It is a realization of decades of best practices around Model-View-Controller architecture. Make the time to prototype some applications in this environment. At the least, you will get some good ideas to take to your core development environment.

Well said, Sonjaya!

Ruby is a great language and Ruby On Rails is a framework worthy of the language.

There are a lot of good ideas and techniques in it. Hopefully, it will speed up adoption of a lot of the great approaches to software development that have gone unnoticed and unused by the bulk of programmers for so many years, and in some cases - decades.

I just realized the 2nd edition of the Rails book from the agile programmer was actually on sale in PDF form already, only an hour or two ago myself. I think I might do as she suggests and buy it.

Then I get the advantages of having it now, plus free updates for it later on.

I recently got an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday, so I will be picking up a couple more Ruby titles this month as well.

I finally am mastering the arcane art of blocks and procs. The result is I can do some really fun functional programming style things now in a very apt fashion.

I really am loving Ruby and it is great to see that programmers are finding Rails just as lovable.

AJAX validation in Rails

2006-05-05T05:42:00.000-04:00
I have noticed it is pretty hard to get away with writing a software application without data entry validation.

It is kind of like eating a meal without opening your mouth. If you do manage to do it, you are going to be a real mess. And probably not fulfilled your technical requirements very well.

In AJAX validation in Rails, BigSmoke says:
This text discusses how I handled validation messages and other notices caused by AJAX requests.

Note that, as of this moment, this page will probably not work in IE because, for now, it's an XHTML 2(!) page that is converted client-side to an XHTML 1 document. Given the target audience of this writing, I thought this to be not too much of a problem.

Well, unfortunately, I have to add Apple Safari 2.0.3 to the list of browsers the page does not work with. In Safari, the page just comes up blank.

Works great in Camino 1.0.1 and Firefox 1.5.0.3 though.

The article is really easy to read and the color-coded/pretty-printed source code listings with snippets of Ruby and Javascript code in them are really easy on the eyes.

I think this article will be high on my list of things to read when I am doing some AJAX/JSON programming in Ruby On Rails.

Technorati Tags:
programming, ruby, rubyonrails, ajax, json

Ruby On Rails Framework Adds AJAX Tools In Major Update @ SYS-CON AUSTRALIA

2006-05-04T15:51:00.000-04:00
AjaxWorld News Desk @ SYS-CON AUSTRALIA has just now reported on the Ruby On Rails 1.1 release that came out last month.

They mention some of the best new features added in the 1.1 release, including: RJS, ActiveRecord enancement, and - naturally - the improved ability to do AJAX-style programming.

Javalon and Rubitilicus

2006-05-04T14:04:00.000-04:00
Though I know a lot of computer languages, I do not really learn new ones on a whim anymore. There has to be a good reason to pick up a new one these days. Especially, if it is a relatively complicated one like Ruby - with very different syntactical idioms than others I have used.

A language like Java really is competing for the same jobs, contracts, programmers, and book market as Ruby. So, while the languages are not really all that similar to each other - they will be showing up at the same contests, and get to know each other really well.

Ruby and Java are like two very different organisms.

Both are roughly the same size. Both have claws, sharp teeth, webbed feet, 2 eyes that see things well close up and far away and spot movement easily. Both run on 4 legs, with webbed toes, and can swim if they have to.

They are both social creatures and usually hunt and live in packs. They communicate with each other, mark their trails, and also mark their territory.

One is a reptile. A cool, thoughtful, cautious, character.

The other is a mammal. It has a faster metabolism, and it burns more energy, especially when it seems to be at rest. It can cover more ground in less time than the other.

While they have some superficial differences and similarities, they also have one other thing in common. They both hunt the same prey. They live in the same ecological niche, despite their dissimilar ancestory and completely different taxonomy.

One way that computer languages have distinguished themselves from each other for the past decade goes beyond grammar things like syntax. What is almost as important on a day-to-day basis as that to a programmer is the standard library.

The Java standard library has a great GUI API - almost a framework, really. Swing GUI programs can run unchanged on lots of different platforms. They can adopt the native look and feel of the platform, use one of the built-in ones that comes with Java, or a company IT department or application programmer can define their own.

Yet J2SE does not come with any web APIs in its core library. You have to pick those up separately, with a web container like Tomcat, or a J2EE container like JBoss.

Then you get things like servlets, JSP (sort of like ASP), JSTL (a template language with a simple expression-evaluator and some standard tags), etc.
Or, you can write your own - the basics are not hard.

Still, web support is not included in every Java environment.

Ruby does not have a standard desktop GUI. Yet it does support web programming very well - right out of the box. It comes with CGI support, a templating tool (erb), and its own web server called WEBrick.

The core libraries of both languges come with XML support.

The support for XML in Ruby, through REXML, is more high level than that of Java (though lacking in validation support). Ruby also comes with support for the super-popular RSS standard. Java does not come with RSS support.

Java supports code reuse beyond standard OOP techniques using templates. Templates can be typesafe and are basically parameterized class types.

Java supports iteractors too, through another upgrade introduced in J5SE: the improved for statement.

Ruby supports code reuse beyond OOP through: mixins (via its include statement), and blocks. It also has a lot of direct support for functional programming and iterating through collections.

The technologies in both languages can cut down on source code bloat.

As is typical of most other things in these languages, Java makes it possible to write safer code with more pre-execution checking available. Ruby offers little such built-in safety. Yet a programmer has to write less code to get reuse - sometimes far less code.

Yes, unit tests will catch a lot of errors if you write them. However, nobody tries to get 100% coverage with their unit tests, let alone achieves that. Excellent unit testing frameworks are available for programs in both languages too, so as a point of comparison - unit tests are moot.

If you feel like doing far less typing, chances are, Ruby will fit your bill.

If you do not mind typing in a lot more code, as long as you get a lot of compiler-time checking, then Java is probably more to your ilking.

Another concern is Integrated Development environments. Clearly it matters as much, if not more so, than the contents of the standard library. After all, you can always look for things not in the core libraries in some third party libraries.

Java has Eclipse and NetBeans as its flagship IDEs. These IDEs are both widely accepted and on the cutting edge of technology. They are both really powerful.

Until recently, the Ruby community did not have a really solid IDE. However, RadRails is fast becoming that IDE.

Ironically, RadRails is based on the open source Eclipse IDE. So, basically, the leading Ruby IDE is written in Java.

All irony aside, that IDE is pretty good for writing/debugging/testing Ruby applications.

RadRails is not done yet, though. It still has a way to go before it reaches version 1.0 and has supported all the features that it eventually should. However, it has already received a major software development tool award.

By next year sometime, RadRails will probably be as good a Ruby On Rails and Ruby IDE as Eclipse is for Java. And it will probably have better support for Ruby-based web development than Eclipse offers for Java-based web development.

Ruby vs. the World - a quick glance

2006-05-04T13:39:00.000-04:00
There are lots of things in Ruby I recognize from other languages.

Some of them seem borrowed directly from LISP.

lamda

clearly, the LISP lambda functions, also found in Python, borrowed from Lambda Calculus

blocks

very similar to LISP prog function

The way every Ruby function returns a value, the value of its last statement, and the return statement is not required - this comes directly from LISP.

The Ruby send method is similar to SmallTalk.

Look at how rival languages are faring today.

SmallTalk seems to have kind of lost the following it had in the 80s and 90s - despite the availibility of some very decent free implementations today.
LISP has never become a mainstream language and never will.
Python is popular, and simulaneously, growing in popularity and power almost every year. However, not as fast as Ruby. Nonetheless, it does have some major wins under its belt: Yahoo and Google have written a number of services in Python. The Django and Zope frameworks are really popular and are proven successes - witness things like the Plone CMS and at least one super-cool Web 2.0 blog.
Pascal is dead. With the demise of Borland's languages - Delphi, the last bastian of Pascal - has lost its patron.
C seems to have been relagated to being an OS and embedded systems programming language. Its attractiveness as an application programming language has seriously waned.
C++ still used as a first-tier programming language on MS-Windows, but will likely be devoured on that platform by its proprietary Microsoft cousin, C#
Visual Basic seems destined to be never more or less than it is now: a popular MS-Windows only proprietary language for the MS-Windows platform whose environment and grammar change every few years to suit the OS marketing agenda of its maker
Java seems to have subsumed the cross-platform custom IT application market. It looks like it will be embracing all the scripting languages in JDK 1.6, which is already in beta. Ruby and Java fight on the same battlefields but with dramatically different tactics. Very similar goals are being solved with each: interactive websites, online databases, custom IT applications, etc. Both are very object-oriented. Java is a powerful, yet very conservative language. It puts its stock in proven, safe principles - not syntax tricks. Ruby is different. It completely lacks most of the guardrails Java has built-in. Its skeleton is far less rigid. It favors using syntax tricks to make programs more expressive, readable and terse. At the same time, it allows programmers to make big mistakes which are caught late - something anathema to fundamental Java philosophies.

Some languages - like Python - are very similar to Ruby in terms of their characteristics and runtime environments.

Other languages - like Java - are very different to Ruby. Both, in terms of how much help they give programmers at runtime (and vice-versa!) and in terms of their langage grammar.

Python, Ruby, and Java are pretty relevant options to a lot of the same computing projects. They are all object-oriented and they are all very portable. Programs written in them tend to be portable as well.

The other languagss seem to be solving different problems, existing in difference niches.

So, while there are myriad programming languages out there, most are not relevant to solving the same big problems as these three are.

somewhere near or far from beginning - and far, far from ending

2006-05-04T11:21:00.000-04:00
Last year I began a journey which I hope will turn me into an expert Ruby programmer.

Since then I have worked on some interesting programs: a text-based Role Playing Game (RPG), a yet-unfinished chess program, and a recently-started expression parser-and-evaluator.

I know a lot of computer languages. So many that it would be annoying to list them all here. Check my sidebar. I will list a bunch of them there.

I was kind of a language geek for a long time. Plus, I am in my third decade in the programming field.

So the number of programming, web document, and writing-tool languages I learned by impulse or compulsion is pretty high.

Ruby is one of the former. Nobody is forcing me to learn it. No one is even helping me to learn it. At least not formally.

As I learn new things related to Ruby programming, I will post some of the more interesting ones here.

I have a few quotes from the Dune books about beginnings. They sound kind of profound. They make a good close to my first post on this blog.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows.
- from Manual of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan(source: Wikipedia)

Some actions have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end. It all depends upon where the observer is standing.
- Leto Atreides