Thanks for this good work. PS -----Original Message----- From: Dave / PragmaticProgrammer.com [mailto:Dave / PragmaticProgrammer.com] Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 10:47 PM To: ruby-talk ML; ruby-weekly-news / ruby-lang.org Subject: Ruby Weekly News Ruby Weekly News: 10/07/2002 A summary of activity on the ruby-talk mailing list, brought to you this week by Pat Eyler. ANNOUNCEMENTS ============= JRuby beta 1.6/0.5.2 JRuby (http://jruby.sf.net) is a pure Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, being developed by a team lead by Jan Arne Petersen. JRuby is free software released under the GNU General Public License. JRuby is tightly integrated with Java to allow both to script any Java class and to embed the interpreter into any Java application. Blogtari 0.0.2 released Version 0.0.2 of Blogtari is available at http://www.jamesbritt.com/articles/blogatari.html Blogtari is blogging software. It is meant to allow people interested in setting up a blog site to get going quickly, while leaving open options for developers looking to add new tricks. WNS XFormer version 0.0.0 WnsXFormer converts a text file describing a weekly news summary (as might be prepared for mailing list) into RSS 0.9 and an E-mail message body. xmlscan-0.1.0rc1 xmlscan doesn't provide a friendly interface, but it is able to parse any XML documents exactly and fast. xmlscan also contains htmlscan, an HTML parser. ZenTest 1.0.1 ZenTest scans your target and unit-test code and writes your missing code based on simple naming rules, enabling XP at a much quicker pace. ZenTest only works with Ruby and Test::Unit. ZenWeb 1.14.0 ZenWeb is a system for building entire websites, not just pages. It allows you to focus on the content and the structure of the website, while leaving page construction, markup, layout, navigation as secondary concerns. Inline::C meeting The Seattle.rb will be hosting a development meeting for Inline::C on October 8th, at 7PM. We'll be meeting at the Omni group's offices, directions are at the Seattle.rb web pages. INTERESTING THREADS =================== thoughts on typelessness David Alan Black started a discussion on ruby's typelessness. He said: 'Ruby objects are what they are at a given moment, whether or not that's what they were or what they will be. And in their momentary permutations and capabilities, they can do some very powerful things.' William Djaja Tjokroaminata commented that: 'In a "statically typed" language (such as C), variables have types, while data do not. In a "dynamically typed" language (such as Ruby), variables do not have types, while data do.' Several interesting diversions were made. Lots of good information passed along. At the end of the day, everyone was happy. announce@ == less email (FAQ item?) Ryan Davis announced the advent of an announce only mailing list. In his view, all future software announcements should be made to this list (and thence forwarded to ruby-talk). A lot of discussion ensued about the value of this new mailing list, and the value of splitting rubytalk into yet more mailing lists. See below for an extension to this thread. Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know William Djaja Tjokroaminata put together a nice list of things that "ruby nubies" should know. Many other people contributed their thoughts as well. RubyConf: insurance problems solved While it was a very short thread, David Alan Black deserves many Kudos for getting everything worked out. He (and a variety of other folks) have put in a lot of time and effort to pull of RubyConf this year. Huzzah! MetaRWN Holden and I have been discussing the role and shape of RWN should the great list splitting come to pass. Both of us have enjoyed working on this weekly mailing. I've certainly learned a lot about the community as well. But we're really not sure where things should go from here. We've come up with a couple of ideas, but before we spill the beans, we'd be interested in hearing what you think. Will RWN still provide value in the split list world? Are there ways to make it better? What kinds of things should we cover? Please, take a moment and let us know what you think.