What's new with Ruby
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Wow!  There have been big events in the Ruby universe recently.  I&#8217;ll be writing about several of them over the next couple of weeks, but today I want to touch on one that gets pretty deeply into Ruby.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is "very interested" in the Ruby programming language and also plans to expand its Expression design tools line, a Microsoft official said this week. During an Internet chat with InfoWorld, Forest Key, Microsoft director of Web and client user experience marketing for the company's developer division, acknowledged Ruby is on the company's radar screen. Asked if the company would accommodate the Ruby on Rails Web framework, which is based on Ruby, in Expression, Key said, "Ruby is currently more of a 'developer' concept for us." "We are very interested in Ruby and have lots of thinking going on," but nothing to announce at this time, Key said. He advised chatters to "stay tuned." Key added he was not the Microsoft person to comment in detail on this subject because he did not know the companyâs plans. One chatter expressed wishes for an IDE for Ruby on Rails from Microsoft. SapphireSteel, meanwhile, has shipped Ruby in Steel Developer, a Ruby environment for Visual Studio. Commenting on the future of the new Expression line, Key said the company was "just getting started with V1 (version 1) of the Expression Studio," which includes the suite of Expression tools. One area targeted for expansion is interaction design, which pertains to designing the actual interaction or structure of an experience rather than just designing the onscreen pieces. A goal is to better tie Visio, the company's diagram drawing software used by many interaction designers, to Expression and the company's Visual Studio software development platform. While Expression is for application designers and Visual Studio is geared toward the coding side of software development, Key said some features of Expression would turn up in Visual Studio. Software developers would want to use Expression, he said. The planned "Orcas" version of Visual Studio, for example, includes the same design surface for Cascading Style Sheets rendering as the Expression Web product, Key said. Orcas also has XAML capabilities, which are featured in the Expression Blend product. "There are some features that are only in Expression and vice versa, but we are really focused on giving all features to both audiences, just doing it in a role-specific way where everyone can be more comfortable and successful with the solution they are using," Key said. Microsoft believes in collaboration between designers and developers to build user experience-based applications and content, Key said. "If by Web 2.0 we are talking about great experiences that combine Web technologies, social computing components, services, the browser and components of the desktop such as richer graphics an integration with local data, etc, then you could say Expression is all about Web 2.0," Key said. Microsoft also plans more community-accessible content for both XAML and the Expression tools. Key said.
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Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists. The Parrot folks create some TODOs, hash out math semantics, and discuss cross-compiling. The Perl 6 language folks argue about ranges, roles, pipelines, and PRE and POST hooks.
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As Chris Hartjes points out there's a new release of the popular PHP framework CakePHP (as well as a new web site design).   While speaking with nate last night via IM, he told me about the latest set of changes for CakePHP 1.2. There is simply just too much to mention, so I suggest heading on over to the brand-spanking-new CakePHP home page and checking out the changelog.   You can grab the latest download directly from the homepage or look into the manual to find out more about the framework and how it can be used.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Zend Developer Zone: Book Review: Learning PHP Data ObjectsProDevTips: Writing a CMS/Community with Smarty and the Zend Framework: Part 7Ivo Jansch's Blog: Book announcement: Enterprise PHP DevelopmentEvan Sims' Blog: Announcing libGameFlySite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 12.28.2007Reinhold Weber's Blog: From PHP to Ruby - 30 similarities and differencesSanisoft Blog:  Theming your CakePHP apps (V1.2)John Lim's Blog: Why Should PHP ever be taught in school?Zend Developer Zone: Profiling PHP Applications With xdebugCommunity News: A Look Back at 2007
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Mike Naberezny has start up a new resource to try to bridge some of the gap between PHP and Ruby and to help developers of either to get a bit more insight into the others' side - Rails for PHP Developers (based on the book published by the Pragmatic Programmers).   Rails for PHP Developers is a new site for PHP developers who are also interested in Rails and Ruby.  PHP and Ruby are great complementary tools that are sometimes seen as adversarial, which is really unfortunate.  We use both and we'll be writing regular articles to help cross-pollinate ideas and promote collaboration between the communities.    There's already some good content there - useful perlisms in ruby, a look at PHP object attributes and some information about the release of the site itself.
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The developer of Ruby on Rails looks to remove certain features from the Web application framework in order to keep it nimble and easy to use.
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We are proud to announce the release of version 0.9 or LeafRSS! This version includes full smarty template integration, as well as options to embed the articles in another web page, or even to allow the output of the filter as an RSS feed.   A patch file has been included to upgrade from version 0.8 to avoid any loss of data. Please see the PATCH file for details.  This will be the final major release before we release our first stable version.  If you have any questions or discover any bugs in this version, please post them either in the Help section of our sourceforge forums or in our sourceforge bug tracker. We would appreciate any input you could give us to help us test this release in preparation for moving this project to stable status.  More detail is available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/leafrss
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Mike Potter has posted an update on the status that Adobe is making for developers, including some new offerings for PHPers.    Over the last several months, Adobe has made enormous progress with software developers. In the few short months since the Macromedia acquisition, we have released new products, opened access to SDKs and continued to create communities of open source software.   We released two RIA SDKs: one for PHP developers and one for Ruby on Rails developers.  Both of those are free, as in speech.  Head to Google Code for the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe or the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK by Adobe.  Join the mailing list for either of them (PHP, Ruby), they're fairly active.    It's great to see a larger company taking such an interest in the dynamic web languages out there and providing good, solid tools for thier developers to use to create bigger and better applications.
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There are three projects in the Ruby world that really stood out this summer:  JRuby, Mongrel, and Ruport.  It's not so much what they've done in terms of development (though that's been impressive), but how well they've communicated.  This is something that a lot of projects don't do as well, so I wanted to take a look at what they've done in hopes that more projects might follow their lead.
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(InfoWorld) - Don't expect much to be added to Ruby On Rails this year. When David Heinemeier Hansson gives an update on version 2.0 of his Web application framework at its user conference in September, he's as likely to talk about what's coming out as what's going in. The goal is to keep Ruby on Rails fast, lightweight, and easy to use, characteristics that have helped it become a trendy alternative to Sun's Java and Microsoft's .Net and led to a raft of companies offering Rails development services for businesses. "We're going to pull out a fair number of elements, features that aren't a good fit for what people want to do most of the time, and make them plug-ins instead," HeinemeierÂ Hansson said in an interview. "If your application absolutely depends on them, you won't be stranded, you'll be able to get the plug-ins easily." Among the elements to go will be Action Web Service, for creating Web service APIs using SOAP, Heinemeier Hansson said. It's a way of steering developers towards using REST (representational state transfer), his preferred method for linking applications in Rails. "We don't want to turn into Java -- this pack rat that just holds onto any possession. We're not afraid to take out stuff that's not relevant or that we plain don't like," he said. There will be some additions -- the Rails team has some "pent up stuff" in the repository that it's keen to push out, he said. But the focus of Rails 2.0 is to "consolidate and sharpen" what's already there. Keeping the framework light and simple comes at a price, however, and many companies are jumping in to offer Ruby on Rails packages that bundle tools and plug-ins to make the framework more suitable for demanding business needs. Many of those products will be on show at RailsConf 2007 in Berlin in two weeks. Borland Software's CodeGear division is expected to release its Ruby on Rails Java IDE at the show, Heinemeier Hansson said. The product is based on the Eclipse platform and has been in beta since May. Sun will likely give an update on JRuby, an implementation of Ruby for Java environments. The vendor support helps quell jitters among corporate users that Ruby on Rails is not backed by a large company. If the prominent support of Oracle and IBM helped get Linux in the door at big enterprises, the support from Sun and IBM for Rails could do the same. Java and .Net have become "bloatware" as vendors add features for every possible business need, causing companies to look at alternatives, according to Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios, which offers software and services for Rails development. The rise of Rails is as much a matter of timing as anything, she said. "This bloatware stuff has just ground to a halt and the alpha geeks are veering away from anything they don't need to get their work done. At the same time, the IT business cycle is picking up, and people are willing to invest again in new things," she said. Her clients are telecom, media, and finance companies looking for a fast turnaround for new applications. Most are deploying in native Ruby environments, but it helps that Sun is supporting JRuby, she said, which lets companies deploy Rails applications on existing Java servers. Jonathan Siegel, founder of Rails consulting company ELC Technologies, said applications that would take eight to 10 months to develop in .Net can be up and running in four to six months using Ruby on Rails. Still, at three years old, Rails is a young platform and has limitations. One high-profile user, the Twitter social networking site, caused a stink earlier this year by complaining that Rails didn't scale well across multiple databases and that the underlying Ruby language is slow. The open-source community responded by developing a plug-in to address the scaling issue. Some also say that both Ruby and Ruby on Rails need a stronger hand to steer them to prevent multiple implementations leading to compatibility issues. "The major risk for the future and longevity of Ruby, and by association Rails, is whether or not the platform gets splintered," Mitchell said. Siegel said: "I believe Ruby on Rails will overcome a key milestone when the deployment teams at larger organizations feel at home with the deployment side of a Rails application. In my view, that's having a deployment procedure that's as easy to maintain and monitor as for a .Net or a J2EE application." Heinemeier Hansson is nonchalant about the demands. He developed Rails for his own use and not to make money, he says, and if enterprises want to use his framework, it is they who should adjust, not he. "We're not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we're encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails," he said. "Come if you like it, stay away if you don't."
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Mike Naberezny has posted a few more articles to the "Rails for PHP Developers" website (based on this book) covering some more of the basics.  There's three new tutorials posted:  Ruby Block Scope - the basics of Ruby block scope, a common point of confusion for PHP developers new to Ruby.  Variable Arguments - an article that shows two common API patterns found in Rails, variable arguments and option hashes, and how to implement them both in PHP.  Regular Expressions in Ruby - a useful reference that maps all of the common PHP regular expression functions to the equivalents in Ruby.    Check out the rest of the site for even more great content.
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The last week or so has seen new releases of two of my favorite additions to testing (or speccing if you're of the BDD persuasion) in the Ruby world.  zenspider and Kevin Clark have released a new version of Heckle on the 20th, and Mauricio Fernandez released a new version of rcov this morning (the 21st).
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Microsoft gives to receive Microsoft has released early code for its Ruby-on-.NET scripting language during a week of actively courting developers and community feedback.â¦
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On the TechToolBlog, there's an interesting little post where Tim Boland has taken three of the major web programming languages - PHP, ASP.NET and Ruby - and compared the number of job listings for each in three different places and on three different sites.   Here is a 30 minute research into the jobs out there for RoR compared to Asp.Net & PHP. I searched for the phrases "Ruby on Rails", "PHP", "ASP.NET" and radius of 100 miles from the zip code. There is no doubt some overlap of job posting but this is pretty clear indication of where things are.   The three locations he picked were Cincinnati Ohio (his hometown), New York City and San Francisco and the three sites were Monster.com, Career Builder and Hot Jobs. Overall, the postings varied from place to place - ASP.NET cam out on top in Ohio, ASP.NET in New York and PHP over in San Francisco.
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To prepare the way for the upcoming PEAR book from Packt Publishing correctly, Stoyan Stefanov has posted this info about the book and where to find the latest details on it.    Here's the link to publisher's page dedicated to the PHP Programming with PEAR. Guess who wrote the chapter for MDB2? ;)   It's an honour to me to be in the company of the other authors, people who have done a lot for the PEAR community    He also mentions some of the topics that the book will contain, including accessing databases with MDB2, creating and parsing XML documents, and accessing web APIs. The book is coming out in September, so keep on the lookout for it at your local bookseller soon.
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Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists. The perl6-compiler list makes its introduction as Parrot people argue about configuration and namespaces and play Minesweeper and the Perl 6 language list continues to discuss Synopsis 9.