Summary Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, talks with Bill Venners about Ruby's design philosophy, including design imperfection, the danger of orthogonality, and the importance of the human in computer endeavors. ^[1.1] Ruby is an object-oriented language suitable for writing day to day scripts as well as full-scale applications. ^[1.2]

Initially popular in Japan, Ruby has been finding its way into the hearts of programmers all over the world. ^[1.3] Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was initially developed and designed by Yukihiro " Matz" Matsumoto. ^[1.4]

As of 2008, there are a number of alternative implementations of the Ruby language, including Rubinius, JRuby, YARV, and IronRuby, each of which takes a different approach, with JRuby providing just-in-time compilation functionality. ^[1.5] "Ruby" was named as a gemstone because of a joke within Matsumoto's circle of friends alluding to the name of the Perl programming language. ^[1.6]

These include JRuby, a port of Ruby to the Java platform, IronRuby, an implementation for the. ^[1.7] Ruby core class extensions have moved into the Ramaze namespace. ^[1.8] Matz started work on the language sometime in February 1993. ^[1.9] On 25th December 2007 there was a development release of Ruby 1.9 (this is not intended for production systems). ^[1.10]

Major guiding philosophy for the language has been 'the principle of least surprise'. ^[1.11]

With an easy-to-use interpreter, familiar syntax, complete object-oriented functionality and powerful class libraries, Ruby has become a general-purpose language that can be applied to a broad range of areas, from text processing and CGI scripts to large-scale web applications such as Twitter and Basecamp. ^[1.12] Digging deeper, you'll notice that as a scripting language, Ruby offers the ability to make operating system calls directly. ^[1.13] Unlike other languages like Java, variable declarations are unnecessary. ^[1.14]

If you're familiar with classes, inheritance and methods, you'll feel right at home with Ruby. ^[1.15] Other features and concepts in Ruby's bag of techno-jargon include singleton methods, iterators and closures, dynamic loading and threads, etc. ^[1.16]

Philosophically, Ruby is a beautiful manifestation of Zen in zeros and ones. ^[1.17] My conscience won't let me call Ruby a computer language. ^[1.18] That the language is designed to accomodate the computer, first and foremost. ^[1.19]

That therefore, we, the coders, are foreigners, seeking citizenship in the computer's locale. ^[1.20] It is ours, we speak it natively! ^[1.21] We can no longer truthfully call it a computer language. ^[1.22]

From why the lucky stiff, a well known Ruby figure, in his hilarious book Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby. ^[1.23] Palpable aspects of Ruby philosophy in principle are discussed in The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James. ^[1.24] In my next article, we will look at Rails and see how it stacks up against other, more established frameworks. ^[1.25]

The first edition of Dave Thomas book, Programming Ruby (see the on-line Resources) provided a solid introduction to the language, as well as a reference guide to its class libraries, giving it a needed PR boost. ^[1.26] The second version of the ' Pickaxe book', as it is known, now is available. ^[1.27]

Ruby was designed to be an 'object-oriented scripting language', and it indeed feels like a cross between Perl and Smalltalk. ^[1.28]

As part of my plan, I picked up a copy of O'Reilly's The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto (the 'inventor' of Ruby, who is often called Matz by people in the Ruby community). ^[1.29] Regardless, not only were the differences laid out in a way that made it easy to get the two versions confused, but in many cases, it was unclear as to why Ruby 1.9 would be an improvement at all. ^[1.30]

But the authors never showed me what any Ruby code would feel like in real-world usage, not even standard set-piece scenarios like a CD collection organizer or a to-do list application. ^[1.31]

In fact, the authors are so focused on the features of the Ruby language and nothing else that they don't even discuss XML processing or database access two topics that are critical for the vast majority of real-world programmers. ^[1.32]

The text is accurate, humorous, pedagogical and easily accessible. ^[2.1]

Among the highlights are an introduction to Ruby metaobjects (which are slightly less powerful than the fully Python implementation of the Lisp/Smalltalk Meta-Object Protocol), and a description of extending the Module and Kernel objects to provide some equivalent power to the full MOP. ^[2.2] I plan to re-read this part several times; it is not the sort of material which is fully absorbed in one reading. ^[2.3]

Ruby is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features. ^[2.4] An object is a way of encapsulating some data and the actions that can be taken on that data. ^[2.5]

There's also some pointers to good introductions in the show notes, which you can access at learningrails.com. ^[2.6]

Lastly, you might want to also consider that have Python and Smalltalk because the Ruby language was partly derived from Smalltalk conceptually and it's very similar to both Python and Smalltalk syntactically. ^[2.7] BTW, Ruby also was derived from PERL, Lisp, and Ada. ^[2.8]

SANTA CLARA, Calif. March 5, 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and the Community, today announced an early access release of the NetBeans Ruby Pack which provides support for the Ruby programming language. ^[3.1] These features include: code completion for modules, classes, methods and escape codes within literal strings and regular expressions. ^[3.2] NetBeans 6.0 introduced full-blown support for the Ruby language the first in an ongoing list of dynamic languages the NetBeans IDE will support. ^[3.3]

Supporting dynamic languages in a development tool is notoriously hard because they're, well, dynamic. ^[3.4] A Ruby object can say, 'Hmm, I think now I want to be subclass of String,' and with one line of code, do that at runtime. ^[3.5] "It's not a Java-only world, and the NetBeans IDE is a big tent," Sporar said. ^[3.6]

Other features include improved visual tools for building Web applications, Web services, mobile applications, and UML (Unified Modeling Language) models. ^[3.7] Edit/refactor/debug test/deploy functionality for Ruby on Rails development is featured as well. ^[3.8] Groovy gets its attention because it, more than any other language, is designed to work seamlessly with the JVM, and got a lot of attention from an early JSR. ^[3.9] NET runtimes. ^[3.10]

However the JRuby implementers decided from early on that their goal was to run Rails apps, as a result many libraries including all the Ruby standard libraries needed to be ported. ^[3.11] With the help of the JRuby interpreter, Ruby works well with Java, configuring, integrating, and reusing Java software (more on that below). ^[3.12] Perl is an aged language now, in process of being completely rewritten, borrowing features from Python and Ruby. ^[3.13] Ruby has been around for more than a decade, yet only after the Ruby On Rails framework became a runaway hit did developers start noticing the Ruby language. ^[3.14] I do not see anything earth shattering in Ruby, that I do not see in other similar based languages like Groovy, Perl, or Python.. ^[3.15]

In response, Rubinius decided to create a test suite that could help standardize Ruby as a language across the growing number of VM implementations for Ruby. ^[4.1] In the last year, the Ruby on Rails (RoR) Web framework has given Ruby a big boost. ^[4.2]

RoR builds definitions for all tiers of a typical Web application GUI, business logic, and persistence from simple Ruby code, thereby minimizing redundancy, boilerplate code, source-code generation, and configuration. ^[4.3] RoR's ease of use showcases the Ruby language; and Ruby, a full-fledged software language, has much more to offer than RoR. ^[4.4]

The company will maintain the Ruby 1.8.6 line, offering fixes for security and bugs as well as looking to increase the speed of the Ruby interpreter, said Ezra Zygmuntowicz, founder of Engine Yard, on Thursday afternoon. ^[5.1] With many of its clients using Ruby 1.8.6, Engine Yard was concerned that the Ruby development team in Japan might discontinue support for the line as it focuses on the newer Ruby 1.9 version. ^[5.2]

JRuby is a fast Ruby implementation that runs on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so developers get the benefits of developing in Ruby on Rails while leveraging the power of the Java platform for enterprise systems integration and interoperability with legacy Java code. ^[6.1] One of the most powerful features of JRuby is the ability to call out to any Java library as if it were Ruby code. ^[6.2] The Ruby language provides some very nice syntactic features that mean writing less code than would otherwise be the case with other languages. ^[6.3]

The roadmap for JRuby include a number of things including compilation of Ruby code to Java byte code. ^[6.4]

It is based on Ruby 1.9 and currently uses the YARV bytecode interpreter, but will be based on the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure starting with version 0.5. ^[6.5]

Led by Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the chief maintainers of JRuby, a 100% pure Java implementation of the Ruby language, Sun has released JRuby 0.9.1. Among the features of this release are: ^[7.1] JRuby is a pure Java, open-source implementation of the Ruby language. ^[7.2]

Yes I can put up with a language that is slow because it has some features that I want, and consider more important than some performance disadvantage that is an intrinsice cost of those features uner current compiler/runtime technology. ^[7.3] We try to track the evolution of Ruby as it is implicitly specified by the C-implementation of the language. ^[7.4]

Implemented the ability for Ruby code to call and be called by code in other languages. ^[8.1]

Developed a Ruby Mongo Object/Relational Mapper (ORM) framework, an ActiveRecord Mongo adapter, CGI session and logging database storage, a grid file storage wrapper, and more Wrote a pure-Ruby Mongo driver and Ruby and Clojure examples for a Java driver. ^[8.2]

An interesting point about it, is that it may bypass the relational model and hence the well-known object-relational impedance mismatch, to overcome which, ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) software such as ActiveRecord (used in Ruby on Rails) and many others have been developed, for various languages. ^[8.3]

Within the Ruby community I have learnt lots from others, in particular Ruby book authors both paper and electronic (I would guess Dave Thomas, Why (what's new in Ruby 1.8.0, and yes even bits of the Poignant Guide), and Hal Fulton in roughly that order, Slagell's book is decent, I would not have minded starting on Ruby with that), and those most vocal in the newsgroup and irc channel (to many to keep track of let alone mention, Eek and Batsman and earlier in time DBlack deserve special mention). ^[9.1]

If you are interested in a printed reference, the book Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers Guide, written by Dave Thomas and published by the Pragmatic Programmers, is an excellent starting point. ^[9.2] This is all about taking a very dynamic, data-driven view of programs, customising or extending class/object capabilities at run-time. ^[9.3]

The language design owes a lot to Smalltalk, which followed the everything-is-an-object philosophy (so classes are objects, and therefore need their own classes: metaclasses). ^[9.4] So while we've made some good advances, many popular languages and environments still inadvertently encourage tight coupling and rigid code, and we need to get beyond that. ^[9.5] If you need to get working programs delivered fast, you should add Ruby to your toolbox. ^[9.6]

The combination of the power of a pure object-oriented language with the convenience of a scripting language makes Ruby a favorite tool of intelligent, forward-thinking programmers. ^[9.7]

Silverlight News Desk wrote: Microsoft has sent out pre-alpha code of IronRuby, its version of the Ruby language that will let developers write. ^[10.1] Through numerous engaging examples, it shows you how to leverage WPF, Silverlight, and ASP.NET with the Ruby language, and how to use Rails and other Ruby libraries on the. ^[10.2]

Whether you're a Ruby user exploring. ^[10.3] NET or a.NET developer exploring the world of dynamic languages, IronRuby in Action will get you started quickly and show you how to be productive with this powerful new tool. ^[10.4]

Microsoft, Sun and others are pushing the Ruby language across various platforms. ^[11.1] REDMOND, Wash. ^[11.2]

Lam spoke at the Lang.NET conference on Microsoft's campus here Jan. 30, noting that Ruby is a "cross-generational" language because "old fogies and young kids" alike like to use the language. ^[11.3]

Jon Lam announced the very first pre-alpha drop of IronRuby Microsoft open source (!) implementation of the Ruby language, licensed under Microsoft Permissive License. ^[11.4]

As more developers use Ruby on the Microsoft Common Language Runtime, Queensland University of Technology has produced a compiler that brings the object-oriented language to. ^[12.1] Net, developers are responding with solutions to enable it. ^[12.2]

Using the Ruby language on the Microsoft CLR (Common Language Runtime) is doable if you maintain certain guidance, said John Gough, a professor at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in Brisbane, Australia. ^[12.3]

John Lam, the creator of RubyCLR, signs on to help the software giant implement dynamic languages on. ^[12.4] And various researchers and other groups are working on producing a compiler and interoperability bridge for the Ruby language on the. ^[12.5] One of the core principals set out by John Lam and team was to stay true to the Ruby language. ^[12.6]

This is an important principal for adoption by current Ruby developers, who won't want to change the way they create Ruby applications just because they're moving to IronRuby. ^[12.7]

Engine Yard employs Evan Phoenix, the founder of the Rubinius project. ^[13.1] Rubinius and Merb aim to solve these issues. ^[13.2] Apple's open source project called MacRuby aims to address these problems. ^[13.3] At the beginning of the project we debated using Ruby (MRI), Python, Java & Spring, JRuby & Rails & Java, JRuby & Merb & Java, PHP etc. ^[13.4]

There is a lot of diversity in Ruby virtual machine implementations and collaboration between the language implementors. ^[13.5]

New ADC article introducing MacRuby, Apple's in-progress project for writing Cocoa applications in Ruby. ^[13.6]

Meanwhile, in a May 20 blog post, Antonio Cangiano, a software engineer and technical evangelist at IBM, said: "Once long ago, at the time of my first shootout when Rubinius was a very young project and performed poorly, I had an email exchange with Evan Phoenix and I told him, 'I secretly think that your project may become the most interesting implementation of Ruby. ^[13.7]

What's interesting is that since Ruby doesn't really have a specification, it's difficult to say that platform xyz is not a compatible implementation of a Ruby runtime. ^[14.1] I can see this leading to a formal standards body (a la the JCP, but without one vendor with overwhelming control) to guide the Ruby language. ^[14.2]

It'll be interesting to watch the Ruby community mature and see if Rubinius truly open governance model will catch on with other early OSS projects (or rather, with the companies that back these projects). ^[14.3]

After that first RubyConf, we reconnected while both attending Dick Gabriel's pilot MFA in Software Development program at UIUC in early 2003. ^[14.4]

It was there, in his message from the future keynote, that he made public his belief that Ruby could benefit from being hosted on a mature, dynamic (Smalltalk) VM. ^[14.5] He and the engineers at Gemstone have gotten the full Ruby language running on the Gemstone VM in just three months. ^[14.6] David is a Ruby core contributor and the creator and maintainer of RCRchive. ^[14.7]

His book, Ruby for Rails, gives Rails developers an in-depth explanation of the power and expressivity of the Ruby language. ^[14.8]

He is the director of the consultancy Ruby Power and Light, LLC, and a founding director of Ruby Central, Inc. Since 2001 he has been closely involved in the organization and program selection of the annual International Ruby Conference ("RubyConf"), as well as the official International and European Ruby on Rails Conferences. ^[14.9]

The first article takes a look at code completion, debugging, and refactoring support. ^[15.1]

In a recent InfoQ article, NetBeans: Ruby Developer's New Best Friend, NetBeans developer Roman Strobl highlights three features in NetBeans 6 that make Ruby developers lives easier: ^[15.2]

InfoQ presents a video of Dave Thomas QCon London presentation "MetaProgramming Ruby". ^[15.3]

The Ruby language (born 1995) is mostly the brainchild of Japanese Matz who has made it a point of creating a language based on the 'principle of least surprise' while incorporating the best of Smalltalk, Lisp, Perl, etc. ^[16.1] Rails (2004) is a consolidation of good ideas found in frameworks like Zope and J2EE, combined with a simple, thought out, API. ^[16.2] Throw in Ruby, a language that is easy to use and read. ^[16.3]

My talk should act as a quick introduction to the power and simplicity of Ruby, as well as showing the Rails framework an tool which helps hyper-productivity in web applications design. ^[16.4] Like Ruby and now even the Java platform itself, JRuby is open source and has many active contributors. ^[16.5]

JRuby integrates with existing Java technology using JSR 223. ^[16.6]

Discuss Fast prototyping with Apache Derby and JRuby on Rails in the Ruby on Rails forum on Tutorialized. ^[16.7]

NET Developers (Pragmatic Bookshelf, $34.95) authors Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng introduce the joy of Ruby on Rails development to Microsoft. ^[17.1]

NET Developers introduces the joy of Ruby on Rails development to Microsoft. ^[17.2] This book demonstrates the essential elements of both the Ruby language and the Rails application framework, geared especially for developers already fluent in the Microsoft. ^[17.3]

" ThoughtWorks is one of the most respected names in the Ruby world, and we're proud that they've chosen JRuby as their enterprise deployment solution. ^[18.1]

"Mingle is built on the Ruby on Rails web framework," said Cyndi Mitchell, vice-president of strategy for ThoughtWorks Studios. ^[18.2]

I think the most significant strength of the Ruby language is its impressive power and flexibility in metaprogramming. ^[19.1]

Affectionately dubbed 'Monkey Patching' by Ruby developers, metaprogramming makes it easy to 'hack' existing code and frameworks like Rails for infinite customization, while making it easy to keep these hacks legible, organized and maintainable. ^[19.2] You'll discover opportunities to implement patterns in just one or two lines of code, instead of the endlessly repeated boilerplate that conventional languages often require. ^[19.3]

These include ways to create custom objects with metaprogramming, as well as the ambitious Rails-based "Convention Over Configuration" pattern, designed to help integrate entire applications and frameworks. ^[19.4]

I also thoroughly enjoyed Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta (Pragmatic Programmers, ISBN 978-1-934356-47-0). ^[20.1] They're running IronRuby against the Ruby language specs. ^[20.2]

O'Reilly Network: In the five years since the release of The Pragmatic Programmer, it's had ten printings in English, with translations in five languages. ^[20.3]

So this news about MagLev, a new Ruby VM that's supposed to be very fast, is of definite interest. ^[21.1]

Saw this news on Antonio Cangiano's blog. ^[21.2] The speed improvements mentioned for MagLev over the standard Ruby interpreter, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) are claimed to be of the order of 8x to 60x. ^[21.3]

In language Glasgledius computer programming, interpreted language is a vague term referring to languages, most implementations of which are. ^[21.4] This term has no meaning in computer science, which strictly distinguishes between languages and implementations. ^[21.5]

However, people often use it as a useful shortcut to signify languages that are traditionally interpreted, or for which no compilers are written. ^[21.6] In the early days of computing, language design was heavily influenced by the decision to use compilation or interpretation as a mode of execution. ^[21.7]

On the other hand, some languages take advantage of the dynamic aspects of interpretation to make such declarations unnecessary. ^[21.8]

Most so-called interpreted languages use an and trafficking intermediate representation, which combines both compilation and interpretation. ^[21.9]

The intermediate representation can be compiled once and for all, like Java, each time before execution like Perl or Ruby, or each time a change in the source is detected before execution like Python. ^[21.10]

Over time we found that although Rails works great for doing front-end web development, for doing heavy weight back-end processing, Rails had some performance limitations at runtime. ^[22.1]

The other big reason we looked at Scala was that, although we've run into problems with Ruby, we like the flexibility of the language. ^[22.2] I.e., when he said Ruby is not a good fit for reliable, high performance code, maybe he was talking just about CRuby. ^[22.3] Both JRuby and Groovy (and indeed Jython) are modern OO scripting languages. ^[22.4]

Noop's philosophy on stdlib (standard library) includes picking the best implementations from other languages, using JodaTime for Data/Time APIs, and using util.concurrent for concurrency and exposing Google collections. ^[22.5]

During his interactive session, Matz shared insightful ideas on what the future has in store for the Ruby language, interspersed with witty anecdotes on how he came to create and name the language. ^[22.6] He [Yukihiro] also mentioned the work on the long awaited Ruby 2.0 would start in August. ^[22.7]

Not only did we get to interact with great Ruby aficionados, programmers and leaders from across the globe, but we also got to learn and share a lot about the current and upcoming trends, tools & innovations in Ruby. ^[22.8]

The Ruby language is amazingly easy to understand and learn. ^[23.1] Once I got a grasp of the language constructs I moved onto playing with it's C interface so I could extend it in order to allow me to write X Windows code in Ruby. ^[23.2]

I've been messing with Ruby on Rails off and on for a few months. ^[23.3] He is a Program Manager on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft and works on the team creating IronRuby a.NET implementation of the Ruby language. ^[23.4]

These words significantly describe major elements of the language, including flow control constructs like "for" and "while", conditional execution like "if" and "unless", exceptional execution control like "rescue", etc. ^[23.5] NET namespaces and Ruby modules,. ^[23.6] You're instantiating. ^[23.7]

The Ruby language may have some blemishes (and apparently a slow interpreter), but it seems like a pretty nice language in general and pretty devoid of major syntactical or conceptual warts. ^[23.8]

With JRubyStack you can: ^[24.1] With JRubyStack you can: -Develop your JRuby on Rails application using Java from Ruby. ^[24.2] And Twitter continues today to be primarily a Rails application, with a bunch of Ruby daemons doing asynchronous processing on the backend. ^[24.3]

The Ruby language is both imperative and object-oriented in nature. ^[25.1] Finally, Ruby is an interpreted scripting language like Perl and Python and can extend other languages such as C. ^[25.2] Here is his abstract: Ruby is an object-oriented scripting language combining the OOP power of smalltalk with the utility of Perl and Python. ^[25.3]

RubyCocoa is implemented as a bridge between the Objective-C runtime and the official Ruby interpreter. ^[26.1]

Because of this, the bridge must be crossed every time you talk to an Objective-C object from Ruby, and vice-versa. ^[26.2] All objects must be converted from one typing system to another and messages must be forwarded, the cost for which can be prohibitive if done too often. ^[26.3] MacRuby has also been used as an embedded scripting language for Objective-C applications. ^[26.4] Also, under development by Apple, is an implementation of the Ruby language, called MacRuby, which does away with the requirement for a bridging mechanism. ^[26.5]

These excellent Java and Python-based graphics programming environments are mature and full-featured, but RCG offers similar functionality using the elegant Ruby programming language by way of Mac OS X 10.5's : RubyCocoa Objective-C bridge. ^[26.6]

"JRuby enables us to pick best-of-breed Ruby gems and Java libraries and run our application on a mix of Sun x86 and SPARC platforms without recompilation of the Ruby gems. ^[27.1]

"We chose JRuby as the development platform for our Airport Fueling and Dispatch System because it offers rapid development in the expressive and readable Ruby language and a multitude of Ruby and Java libraries," said Uwe Kubosch, Systems Developer for Datek Wireless AS. ^[27.2] Thirdly, being on an established VM gives access to a large amount of libraries that you don't have to reinvent from scratch, or write C bridges to work with. ^[27.3]

The internals of JRuby is thread safe, but we still need to mimic the salient aspects of Ruby itself, which includes all the little annoying threading tricks happening. ^[27.4]

Seeing as it opens up the AppEngine concept to the whole ecosystem of alternative languages on the JVM, people from many different communities can come together and do interesting things on top of it. ^[27.5] The limitations of the platform are also totally understandable, and not very problematic once you get used to them. ^[27.6] What were your motivations to create "yet an other language for the JVM"? ^[27.7]

I illustrate these points with code samples and present a messaging example that shows how to integrate Java systems with Ruby, putting to good use the flexibility, expressiveness, and power of a dynamic metaprogrammable language. ^[27.8] I intend to show how you can use the complementary strengths of the Ruby language and the Java platform. ^[27.9]

There is enough information around about the merits of Java, so I am going to focus on how Ruby can enable Java with new super powers. ^[27.10]

Internal DSL implies that you are actually executing Ruby code, the language itself, the DSL would actually be Ruby code that's executable and then eval and then does what it needs to do versus external DSL where you deal more pre-processing to get it into the Ruby language and then be executed. ^[27.11]

Ruby is well on its way to become mainstream, which is surprising in a good way; Ruby is an expressive, intuitive, and powerful high-level language with object-orientation done right. ^[27.12]

But I keep my eye on other languages that can play a role in my Java-based systems, and Ruby has recently emerged as a particularly good candidate. ^[28.1] As if it wasn't enough with that, there's JRuby, which is a Java-based implementation of the Ruby language that lets me access Java objects from within my Ruby application. ^[28.2]

ORN: Ward Cunningham once told me "With better IDEs, static languages such as Java are almost as easy to program in as dynamic languages. ^[29.1] These languages, applied properly, are a strategic advantage. ^[29.2] The absence of type and the dynamism makes it also impossible for IDEs to do some operations you would do on typed static language (like Java). ^[29.3]

You'll also observe those IDEs tested here are all written in Java (as Plugins). ^[29.4]

We have re-implemented the important C external libraries and have gotten to the point that Rake, Ruby on Rails, WEBrick, and RubyGems are mostly working. ^[30.1]

This distinction will be lost over time, since I hope the other implementation succeed and provide additional decent Ruby implementations. ^[30.2] Rails is especially indicative of our progress; it is arguably the most complex Ruby application available today. ^[30.3]

With our compatibility and 'correctness approaching C Ruby, we are also in a better position to start advancing JRuby's core with a compiler and new optimizations. ^[30.4] Because we have no C extensions to support (as does C Ruby) we have the flexibility to make sweeping architecture changes within JRuby to better support the needs of the Ruby language. ^[30.5]

This allows them to get a speed boost from the beginning, but also ties them to certain implementation and design decisions that might later prove to be an issue. ^[30.6] Then there's the fact that much of Ruby code and libraries are not yet ready for compilation; they expect. ^[30.7]

Baird's examples demonstrate key features of the Ruby language (such as inheritance, encapsulation, higher-order functions, and recursion), while simultaneously solving difficult problems (such as validating XML, creating a bilingual program, and creating command-line interfaces). ^[30.8] Ruby is the fastest growing programming language today, and for good reason: Its elegant syntax and readable code make for prolific and happy programmers. ^[30.9]

Ruby by Example shows its readers how to take advantage of Ruby as they explore Ruby's fundamental concepts in action. ^[30.10]

NET Interop MSDN MagazineIn my article in the February 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine ("Getting Started With IronRuby And RSpec, Part 1"), I introduced you to IronRuby and demonstrated how it lets you use the dynamic Ruby language to interoperate with. ^[31.1]

Secondly, it makes it possible to interoperate with other languages on the same VM, which allow true polyglot programming (meaning, using the right language for a task, and mixing them when it makes sense). ^[31.2]

RSpec is the de-facto BDD framework for ruby. ^[31.3] Specifications are written in Ruby language, but are run by using JRuby. ^[31.4]

JRuby supports interacting with and defining Java classes from within a Ruby program as well as Bean Scripting Framework support. ^[32.1]

JRuby provides Ruby programs with access to Java classes, allowing them to be used as first-class objects within them. ^[32.2]

There have been a lot of interesting like regional conferences in the US and about Ruby. ^[33.1]

Ruby has a lot of interesting other domains that it can actually apply to and the means of complexity where you want to layer that complexity behind a really nice language as Rails does for you--we talked about the kind of database driven web world. ^[33.2]

It doesn't have to necessarily be database driven anymore but I'm saying that world with the web, there's a lot of other interesting domains like telephony, and things like Adhersion that map the telephony domain behind a really nice Ruby domain specific language. ^[33.3]

Ruby has some tremendous potentials of moving out beyond just Rails into other domains and there's a lot of interest in that from people that are using even Rails; how can we actually layer some nice rich Ruby API or Ruby language, if you will, a DSL, on top of our domain outside of Rails or anything else? ^[33.4] We have a couple of proposals about RAD, which is Ruby Arduino Development. ^[33.5]

Chad Fowler: Yeah; and again it's a very Railsy DSL and it looked like Active Record sort of that Greg Bornstein did which sits on top of the Arduino stuff and actually generates code I believe on the cover so that you can program the Arduino in pure Ruby. ^[33.6]

The makers of Ruby on Rails (RoR) would have you believe that you can use it to code the next Google acquisition in your sleep. ^[33.7]

The Rails framework removes a lot of the tedious, repetitive tasks that face web developers thanks to a boatload of intelligent defaults, while the Ruby language allows developers to write code that can express many common algorithms more naturally than other languages. ^[33.8] Probably the most significant new feature is RJS an API that generates JavaScript code out of Ruby code. ^[33.9]

For those developers who are particularly taken with Ruby's syntax, being able to write client-side behaviour in their preferred language will be a welcome change. ^[33.10] Rails's database API, Active Record, has also had a few powerful enhancements added on, and there are plenty of other little tweaks that experienced Rails developers will notice too. ^[33.11]

A press conference was held in Japan this week to announce a business collaboration with CodeGear, Open Source Japan, and Network Applied Communication Laboratory (NaCl) to drive enterprise Ruby on Rails adoption in Japan. ^[34.1] This is where Ruby started, where many developers have embraced Ruby and where we see growing use in the enterprise market. ^[34.2] CodeGear, the Borland company, is going to announce its Ruby on Rails IDE. ^[34.3] Kanai has more details on his blog. ^[34.4] Among the topics discussed is the move to native threads. ^[34.5] Ruby is fully object oriented with a simple and consistent syntax. ^[34.6] "This isn't a book to teach you Ruby on Rails from the beginning there a lots of books like that out there," explains Leonard. ^[34.7]

"Our book assumes you have a basic understanding of the Ruby language and the Rails framework. ^[34.8]

When asked to 'choose components select both ' SciTE 'and ' Rubygems. ^[35.1]

On Ubuntu/Debian for instance, this is as simple as: ^[35.2] Chapter 5 describes the tools that come with the standard Ruby distribution debugger, profiler, and irb (Interactive Ruby) and some useful tools not bundled with the Ruby standard distribution. ^[35.3]

This book presents those details in a clean and concise format. ^[35.4]

It begins with a one-chapter concise introduction to Ruby syntax including files and how classes and modules are laid out, the basics of the Ruby installation on a user system, the use of the Ruby interpreter irb, and some of the basic tools, particularly gem and rake. ^[35.5]

The simple editors like vim (for the nostaligcs) or SciTE are likely to fit your needs for short and simple scripts but a full IDE is always better to have when you are working on a more important project. ^[35.6]

JetBrains is offering an upgrade to its Java IDE, IntelliJ Idea 7.0, featuring Web development tools and backing for the Ruby language. ^[36.1] Included are tools for developing complex Web applications, with Web services and dynamic language support. ^[36.2]

Advanced JavaScript capabilities with basic Flex support will be accompanied with plugins for Ruby/JRuby and Groovy development within a few weeks. ^[36.3]

It provides a simple, practical and nice alternative for java people to solve various problems which is not easily solved in java language with elegant code. ^[36.4]