Room for improvement?

Charles Miller reports that Ruby and REXML is 50 times slower than Java and dom4j at parsing XML into a DOM tree, and suggests that maybe Ruby isn't ready for production environments.

Dion Almaer wonders if, since the dataset was 25MB in size, the problem isn't so much with Ruby as with DOM.

Martin Fowler on closures in Ruby

I just ran across a blog post from Martin Fowler on closures, primarily in the context of Ruby. I realize that the three of you who actually read this blog occasionally know what closures are, but on the off chance someone new comes along, it's an informative if somewhat simplistic read.

October meeting pushed back

The October KCRUG meeting has rescheduled.

2004-11-03 7:00 PM
Ruby Tuesday
9707 Quivira Rd
Overland Park, KS

If past experience is an indicator, look for three or four people lurking at a table in a corner with at least one laptop.

Rubilicious

Rubilicious. To go with Cocol.icio.us and Groovylicious, of course. (That last one doesn't actually have a name, but I was on a roll.)

Rails

This one has to be seen to be believed. Fortunately, this is easy, assuming you can play QuickTime movies (and have a high-resolution screen; 1024x768 wasn't enough to see all the action).

Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby. The thing that's different about it is

Rails shuns configuration files and annotations in favor of reflection and run-time extensions. This means the end of XML files telling a story that has already been told in code. It means no compilation phase: Make a change, see it work.

I develop web applications in Java for a living, and the extent of how much was accomplished during that 10-minute video floored me. I suspect that the day job will remain Java for the forseeable future, but the stuff I do for the fun of it is about to get a whole lot more fun.

Thanks to Dion Almaer for the link.

An Introduction to RubyCocoa

MacDevCenter has posted the first part of an article entitled "An Introduction to RubyCocoa":

RubyCocoa is a framework that provides a bridge between the Ruby programming language and the Cocoa framework of the Mac OS X operating system. This framework allows you to create Mac OS X native, Cocoa-based applications using Ruby.

Since, as far as I know, I'm the only person around here running Mac OS X, this isn't going to be much of a "hands-on" article for the rest of you. Maybe there's a nugget or two of interesting in there anyway.

New version of Pickaxe book is available

The second edition of Programming Ruby (aka the Pickaxe book) is now shipping. Shashank says he received a copy at RubyConf 2004.

Everybody (so it seems) talks about the Pickaxe book like it's the one to own, but I have a guilty confession of sorts. I'm new to Ruby, so I turn to the online copy of the first edition a lot—and I'm not very impressed with how it's arranged. It seems like every time I go to look something up, I have to try two or three different chapters before I find what I'm looking for.

Maybe it's because it's an HTML version; there's no index, and the table of contents is more a list of chapters than a detailed outline of the book. Maybe it's because this book isn't intended for beginners like me. Maybe it's because the way I think has been molded by exposure to too many O'Reilly books on Perl. :-) Whatever the reason, I think I'm going to need to leaf through a dead-tree version of the Pickaxe book to justify buying one.

Why Cedric loves Ruby

From Cedric's weblog: "Why I love Ruby".

The interesting thing (for me) was how it started with a single line of Ruby code, showed how many lines of Java code are needed to do the same thing—then the comments turned out half golfing in Ruby and half 99 Bottles of Beer.

There's a followup entry titled "It's not about one-liners".