Ruby Weekly News: 09/09/2002

   A summary of activity on the ruby-talk mailing list, brought to you
   this week by Pat Eyler.

   ANNOUNCEMENTS
   =============

   scanf for Ruby, version 1.1.0
          The Texas Coding Fest crew has released the next version of
          their scanf implementation ... way to go guys!

   drb-1.3.6 security hall
          This is a security fix to drb. If you're using drb, please
          upgrade.

   amrita V0.9.1(first beta release)
          Amrita is an html/xhtml template library for Ruby.

   ruby-libxml
          libxml for Ruby. Sean is still pluggin away, and reported some
          results on the Rubynet mailing list ( see
          http://lists.rubynet.org/pipermail/rubynet-devel/2002-September
          /000013.html for more info).

   ruby-libxslt (see above)
          A working, fully compliant, XSLT engine for Ruby.

   yaml.rb
          yaml.rb is a ruby library for handling YAML, a data
          serialization format. Documentation and a cookbook are
          available at http://yaml4r.sourceforge.net

   WEBrick
          WEBrick is an http server building library for ruby. After last
          weeks request for Ruby Based App Servers, this seemed apropos.

   PDX.rb meeting tonight (09/09/2002)
          "We're having a PDX.rb meeting tonight at 7PM at the Lucky Lab
          pub on the north side of SE Hawthorne at 10th St."

          I'll say it again, user groups rock! If there's one near you,
          support it. If there isn't, start one!

          BTW, PDX is Portland, Oregon ... for those who didn't know

   INTERESTING THREADS
   ===================

   Ruby Object Persistence Service
          Gabriel Emerson put forward the idea of having an OR mapping
          service. He posted a well thought out email describing (at a
          high level) how it could work. The main advantage is that the
          persistence mechanism is out of process from other Ruby
          interpreters. Under this approach, there would be benefits for
          mod_ruby users. A very interesting idea.

   New List [ruby-modules]
          Sean Chittenden has taken action to start a new mailing list
          for Ruby developers. The list is intended for people that who:
          write Ruby modules in Ruby, write Ruby modules in C/Ruby,
          distribute Ruby modules, install Ruby modules, and are actively
          engaged in developing software using Ruby modules. You can
          subscribe here([1]).

   Suggestions for the Ruby Community
          It was brought to the communities attention that some people
          perceive the state of documentation for the many Ruby modules
          available to be sub standard and incosistently arranged. This
          sparked a huge thread comparing to perldoc and how Python deals
          with this. Jim Freeze stepped up to the plate offering to
          spearhead a documentation standardization project for Ruby. He
          presented an initial plan([2]).

   Larry Wall's comments on Ruby
          Wow! Larry talks about ruby (well, he made a couple of
          comments), and it ignites a huge thread on the mailing list.
          Lots of folks ended up putting in their two or more, sometimes
          much more ;), cents. A good read!

References

   1. http://lists.ruby-support.org/lists/listinfo/ruby-developers
   2. http://www.ruby-talk.orb/49080