Labnotes

Go with the flow. If you need to check out what’s happening in Ruby land, check out RubyFlow, “a community driven Ruby links site”. (Via Ruby Inside)

Documented. Unfortunately I’m back to RDBMS land, but I’m really curious about StrokeDB. The short version:

StrokeDB is an embeddable distributed document database written in Ruby. It is schema-free, it scales infinitely, it even tracks revisions and perfectly integrates with Ruby applications.

Obviously this one will be compared to CouchDB, which now defines the category. Don’t. It has some interesting ideas that are easy to miss if you’re looking at why “this one is not like the other”. I hope to read more about its version control, the API has elegance to it and can easily resolve references, and there’s promise of a JavaScript port. I’m not sold on the embeddable aspect, I’d rather use a database that’s independent of the runtime language (once Derby, twice shy). But the API is compelling and native code will deal with performance issues.

Responsible monkeying. Sustainable development in Ruby: Introduction, Part I (inherit early, inherit often) and Part II (inject as little as necessary). Eh what? Just because you can monkey patch every piece of code doesn’t mean you should. Remember, you’d have to maintain it someday! Avdi Grimm explains how to do useful stuff with the mininum of collateral damage on future generations. I buy it. More sustainable development. Please.

Ruby.exe. Peter Cooper asks, Is Windows a First Class Platform for Ruby? From what I’ve seen, the Windows experience leaves much to be desired, though some of it is just the fact that Windows is, well, Windows. How many of you are using Windows to develop/deploy Ruby apps?

Untouchable. Google, not particularly fond of Ruby. Evidence no.2: Using Ruby with the Google Data APIs. (Evidence no.1 is lack of a client library) It’s the opposite of anything Ruby stands for: not simple, not elegant, and nowhere near DRY. By comparison, the Java documentation looks easier. But I’m sure there are no language sentiments at play here, just insufficient time to dig through RubyForge and find several pre-existing Google Data APIs.

_{Picture: LOLcats toy with Schrodinger. LOLcats win.}

Apr 15th, 2008

Ed Spencer

I’ve been using Ruby on Windows for the past two and a bit years, mostly completely painlessly and 95% of the time with Rails. The whole experience was made a lot more pleasurable as soon as I installed the fantastic E Text Editor (e-texteditor.com), which is a Windows port of Textmate (actually I think it even surpasses Textmate in a few things).

Getting Ruby installed is easy enough, gem takes care of almost everything else – the only thing missing is a decent command line :( Even git hasn’t been too much of a hassle to get working, though it could be a lot easier!

Aristotle

Yay! It’s great to see some advocacy for good encapsulation practice in the Ruby camp.

Apr 16th, 2008

links for 2008-04-16 — Chip’s Quips

[...] Labnotes » Rounded Corners – 202 (Ruby roundup) Ruby read. (tags: ruby rubyflow monkeypatching google) [...]

Assaf

E Text Editor is something I would love to have when I worked with Windows.

@assaf on Twitter

Rounded Corners – 202 (Ruby roundup)