Ruby brightens the NetBeans platform
472301
InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems has added Ruby support to the NetBeans IDE and bolstered the JRuby platform as well, company officials acknowledged on Thursday.
334108
(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems has been quiet about its JavaFX technology for building graphical applications since introducing it in May, but on Friday the company added a compiler to the platform. Also on tap is an updated plug-in to outfit the open source NetBeans platform for building JavaFX applications. New online demonstrations also are being made available. Based on the Swing GUI toolkit for Java, JavaFX is intended to bolster development of graphical user experiences for systems ranging from desktops to mobile clients and even TVs. "JavaFX makes the power that existed within Swing more accessible to developers so they can create exciting applications," featuring visual interaction, said Jean Elliott, Sun's senior director of Java software product marketing. At the JavaOne conference in May, Sun unveiled two critical components planned for the platform: JavaFX Script, which is a scripting language for content creation, and JavaFX Mobile, which provides a software system for mobile devices. JavaFX technologies are only in a very early stage of development. Applications will run with a Java Virtual Machine. A beta release of JavaFX technology is intended for release at the JavaOne conference next May, but early access code -- described as "sub-alpha" code by Sun -- has been made available. Source code for the OpenJavaFX Compiler is available here. The compiler enables JavaFX Script code to be compiled into Java code. "What you really want to do is compile an entire program, get it all into Java to begin with and it compiles much faster," said Chet Haase, Sun Java chief client architect. The NetBeans plug-in, meanwhile, will provide for developing JavaFX Script programs in the IDE. JavaFX programs can be built easier, Haase said. JavaFX programs will be available as NetBeans projects. The plug-in will work with NetBeans 5.5 and is due to be incorporated this fall into NetBeans 6.0, the upcoming version of the IDE. The NetBeans 6.0 version of the plug-in features a preview of JavaFXPad integration. JavaFXPad is a lightweight tool for building graphical elements using JavaFX Script. The NetBeans 5.5 plug-in can be accessed here, while the NetBeans 6.0 variant is available here. Two demonstrations are available showing an instant messaging client and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) integration. Users must first have the Java development kit installed to view the demonstrations. The demonstrations can be found here.Â  With JavaFX Sun seeks to enable more lightweight, easier development of consumer-oriented applications, Haase said. These could include Web sites with rich animation and user interfaces that are more dynamic than a typical forms-based application, he said. JavaFX joins what is becoming a crowded market for technologies to create graphical interfaces. "The market is only recently crowded," said analyst Joe Niski, of Burton Group. Adobe's Flash and Flex technologies have been around for a while but have not generated a lot of excitement lately, Niski said.Â  But Sun's JavaFX and Microsoft's new Silverlight platform have been added to the mix, he noted. Sun is off to a good start with JavaFX, said Niski. "They have a really compelling story, at least with the platform penetration, because JavaFX will run on any JVM," Niski said. "The one thing that it lacks is good graphical tooling targeting Web designers," he said. "It's good to see Sun putting attention into the user experience," said Niski. JavaFX extends beyond AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). "AJAX makes it easier to build more dynamic Web pages but itâs still about static Web pages," Haase said. "It's not as rich an interface for the user," as JavaFX, he said. JavaFX Script was built with developers of graphical and GUI applications in mind, Elliott said. JavaFX Script code was downloaded 3,000 times from May 13 to June 10. Microsoft is set to soon ship a release candidate for Silverlight. A release candidate is considered a precursor to the general release of the technology.
736650
Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...
621839
"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
318295
(InfoWorld) - CodeGear on Monday is releasing CodeGear 3rdRail, an IDE for building applications with the popular Ruby on Rails open source Web framework. The product gives Rails developers, who have been mostly relying on text editors, their own IDE, Borland said. Developers have flocked to Ruby on Rails for its speed and ease of use in building rich Web 2.0 applications, CodeGear said. "We've been watching the Rails framework grow in popularity for the last year, and we worked with it ourselves, and we're really excited about the capabilities of the Rails framework. We recognize that there's an opportunity for somebody to provide a really solid tool for Rails and one that is built just for doing that," said Joe McGlynn, director of product management at CodeGear. "Everything in the tool is focused on just building Rails applications," McGlynn said. 3rdRail includes a feature called Commanders, which provides a variety of capabilities intended to ease the development process, including the ability to run scripts. Command completion and option completion functions are offered that are similar to code completion capabilities for writing code. "It's a keystroke that gives you a pop-up list of what you can do," said McGlynn. A hyperlinking-of-output function offered as part of Commanders can link to files and directories in different areas of a project, making it easier to navigate files. Intelligent code completion and refactoring also are featured. Code completion is particularly useful for building Rails applications because a lot of the methods developers will want to call do not exist until runtime. Developers can write code against methods that are generated dynamically, McGlynn said. Developers with 3rdRail can more efficiently traverse application structures, CodeGear said. A dependency view uses a combination of syntactic and semantic analysis to view project interdependencies. A turnkey Ruby on Rails runtime environment is packaged with 3rdRail. It includes databases; Gems, a component packaging and distribution mechanism for Ruby; the Gem manager; and tools. 3rdRail is plug-in-compatible with the Eclipse platform. Web development tools bundled with the product include the Mozilla browser, JavaScript debugging, and DOM inspection. The creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, could not be reached for comment on 3rdRail late last week. But CodeGear supplied this prepared statement from him: "CodeGear's new 3rdRail IDE represents an important step in tooling for Ruby on Rails,â Hansson said. âThey've gone beyond macros and generators and dealt with Rails code on a logical rather than merely textual level. This opens up a whole new world for things like advanced re-factorings and, in general, provides an environment that's familiar to anyone coming from IDE-heavy environments like .Net or J2EE." 3rdRail is available at an introductory price of $299, including a one-year subscription featuring quarterly product updates. The planned fourth-quarter update adds code validation, for scanning of code and looking for potential bugs. The first update for 2008 focuses on test management, for automatic building and running of unit tests and functional tests for an application. CodeGear had pre-announced the product this past spring. The announcement of Monday's release of 3rdRail is being made at the RailsConf Europe conference in Berlin.
401233
From the RefreshinglyBlue blog, there's a new post that makes a comparison between two of the most popular web scripting languages - PHP and Ruby - on a practical, basic level.   There are rather significant syntactical differences between PHP and Ruby. For example PHP requires semicolons at the end of lines and generally requires curly brackets to enclose blocks of code. Ruby, on the other hand, uses newline characters to denote the end of a line of code...   The post goes through other differences like: value return methods, function/method naming, similarities between them, frameworks, namespaces, documentation and hosting options.
188665
The PHP Community is buzzing about a new article, posted on the O'Reilly Ruby blog, about how the author (Derek Silvers of cdbaby.com) made the decision that Ruby on Rails just wasn't right for the project he was working on.    Back in January 2005, I announced on the O'Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby  website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. [...] The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.   But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this.)    Recounting the rest of the story, Derek mentions the turning point ("Is there anything Rails can do that PHP CAN'T do?") and the speed at which they were able to make up for the two years of lost development time. To helps others make a decision for their project, he also includes seven reasons why he made the decision to switch back, including:   Our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration Don't want what i donÃ¢ÂÂt need I love SQL Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better   There's also been several bloggers in the PHP community that have responded to the article:   Elizabeth Naramore - "Derek Sivers' Article on RoR vs PHP" Paul Jones - "Is there anything Rails can do that PHP cannot do? *No.*" Terry Chay - "Why PHP triumphs over Ruby" Jeff Moore - "Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again"
524181
Reinhold Weber has posted his lists of some of the similarities and differences between Ruby and PHP:   If you are a PHP developer chances are you have heard some of the buzz on Ruby on Rails, an open source web framework for rapid application development. [...] These are similarities and differences of Ruby compared to PHP. If you know PHP, this should give you a good and quick insight in what Ruby is all about and how it compares to PHP.   Some of the similarities include the dynamic typing, class scoping, heredoc abilities and current object references. Differences include syntax differences, method calling, naming conditions and Ruby's lack of interface/abstract classes.
747113
On the devthatweb blog, there's a new post from Pat Nakajima with a recipe for deploying a PHP application with the help of Capistrano (the Ruby on Rails tools for deploying web applications).   Recently though, I was working on a PHP project, and I decided that the time had come to rewrite my Mint recipe to allow deployment of any PHP project, totally independent of Rails. I set to work, and I'm happy to share the result.   The example makes it a simple matter of using the command "cap deploy:php" to use the recipe and push out your PHP application.
38399
Beehive Code Now Available in Apache; XMLBeans Officially Approved as Apache Project
2423
InfoWorld - BEA Systems&#39; planned next-generation application platform, called Project Genesis, will feature an open source component and accommodate scripting languages such as Ruby and Perl, BEA officials said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Tuesday.
537781
Running 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system is a step closer to reality.
673420
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.
390342
InfoWorld - SaphireSteel Software, which helps Microsoft Visual Studio users work with the Ruby on Rails Web framework, launched on Monday a version of its Ruby In Steel IDE embedded with Visual Studio 2008 capabilities.
367280
Zed rails, Bray dizzy The launch of a low-cost Ruby on Rails integrated development environment from SapphireSteel Software based on Microsoft's Visual Studio comes at a turning point for both the Ruby language and its associated Rails framework. But quite what the turning point will be is open to question.â¦
616513
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:Community News: Namespaces in PHP6Mike Potter's Blog: Sample Code From PHP / Flex e-SeminarThe Bakery: PremierMarinas.com, ScienceHack.com and an iPhone AppPHP F1: PHP Session TutorialCommunity News: GoPHP5 Official SiteCommunity News: jPOP Framework - Javascript & PHPTim Koschuetzki's Blog: Composing Methods: Remove Assignments to ParametersAlexey Zakhlestin's Blog: YAML: Syck for PHP is not read-only anymoreMatthew O'Phinney's Blog: File_Fortune refactoredSite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 07.06.2007
396172
Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).