I keep putting off this Ruby News Survey piece because there keeps being more news, but hey, you have to pull the trigger sometime.
1.9 · Check out Tor Norbye’s write-up on using NetBeans to migrate to 1.8.
Sam Ruby reported at length on Porting REXML to Ruby 1.9 and, get this, check what happened to his patch. Sam hasn’t stopped.
Rubinius · First of all, it runs IRB; I remember the JRuby guys having surprising difficulty there; thus this has to be a real milestone.
Engine Yard is Rubinius World Headquarters, and they just took a butt-load of money from Benchmark Capital. Frankly, I’m dubious about the value of most Venture Capital investments in the modern Web economy; but if it keeps Rubinius moving along it’s A Good Thing.
Rails · Shortly after I predicted good times for Rails, there was the infamous Zed rant which is worth reading, not for the morsels of truth possibly burrowed in the billows of bile, but for the flame itself, which is monumental in its scope and ambition. Sample: “Jesus fucking christ on a goddamned pike you absolute mother fucking donkey dick sucking morons get a fucking grip!” The production is so obviously staged that it’s hard to get mad at its infantile drama-queen rhetoric; but I’ll make an exception for Zed’s dissing the people coming over to Rails from PHP; it’s a good thing if people who haven’t spent years on the theory can still build decent Web sites.
For the kinder, gentler, Zed, read Joe Gregorio’s Tim Bray on Ruby on Rails, which sees Rails as being in decline (but read Joe’s commenters too). I find that really hard to believe, since more or less everything Web-related is growing, it’s the relative speeds that matter; but the January Tiobe Index is interesting. Python, you know, not much hype but lots of real work getting done.
Frameworks · You know, it’s not all Rails any more. Camping, Merb, and hey, here’s the pretty nice looking Ramaze which thoughtfully includes a list of other Ruby Web frameworks. I call that damn sporting.
Performance Picture · Check out the second graphic in Dion Hinchcliffe’s Creating Open Web APIs: Exploring REST and WOA in Rails 2.0. Dion deploys a few too many words and pictures for my taste, but the graphic entitled “21st Century Web Development” is thought-provoking.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Dominic Mitchell (Jan 12 2008, at 12:12)
Zed got interviewed by Ajaxian, as a podcast. He comes across quite a bit more personable there. :)
http://ajaxian.com/archives/zed-shaw-interview-on-rails-community-enterprise-ajax-patents-and-a-whole-lot-more
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