Narf: revisiting a 2 year old (Patrick May)

Narf (Not Another Ruby Framework) is a web framework for Ruby. Patrick introduced Narf at an earlier RubyConf. The latest Narf seems to have added a number of libraries and facilities over the past few years.

One of the really interesting points in Patrick’s presentation is how he handles vandals at his wiki site. He has created a tarpit, so that known vandals are redirected to a parallel web site that gets restored every night. The vandals believe they are modifying the real site, but no one else sees the vandals changes.

Another thing to look into is the HtmlArea library for doing rich text form editing in a browser.

ruby-doc.org: Now and the Future (James Britt)

The ruby-doc site was born at the Seattle RubyConf then James Britt and Jim Freeze talked about pulling together documentation for the Ruby community. The site has grown over the years and provides some great information. The biggest downside to the site is the difficulty finding and and navigating the information. James talked about approaches to categorizing information automatically and easily.

(an aside)

Bruce Williams has created a web site for pasting code. There is a section for RubyConf folk to share code. See codepaste.org.

By the way, codepaste is a Rails application, which leads us to …

Ruby on Rails … Origin, Driver, Destination (David Heinemeier Hansson)

David shares how he discovered Ruby and had this wonderful experience with it. Rails, in part, is an attempt to bring the joy of Ruby to the masses by providing an attractive,easy to use web framework.

If you have not seen Rails, check out the ten-minute introduction flash video at media.nextangle.com/rails/rails_setup.mov.

Hang on! There is a rails surprised promised after everybody gets their lunch food.

Lunch Break

(over the shoulder)

I’m sitting behind Rich Kilmer at the conference. I just saw him bring up a web page, pause with the mouse over the submit button and glance over at Chad. He then pressed submit. I think I just saw the first upload of Alph software to RubyForge. Let’s check this out (browses over to RubyForge). Yes, it’s there! Download Alph

The Many Facets of RubyGems (Jim Weirich

What can I say. I think it went well. You can see everything at onestepback.org/articles/rubygemsfacets.

YARV: Yet Another Ruby VM (SASADA Koichi)

Despite an obvious language barrier, Koichi did a great job of communicating with the conference crowd. He showed a great sense of humor. Furthermore, he brought greetings from Matz (who couldn’t make it this year due to the soon to be birth of his child).

YARV is Koichi’s attempt at a VM for Ruby code. If YARV is successful, it will become the Rite used for Ruby 2.0. This is really exciting to see progress in something that might become Rite.

Some properties of YARV include:

• Simple stack machinge
• Ruby C extension
• Not bytecode, but wordcode
• Use Ruby’s existing infrastructure (e.g. gc, parser, API).
• YARV traverses the AST to generate code.

Currently, there are a number of basic Ruby operations that aren’t supported (method_missing comes to mind). Over the next few months Koichi will be implementing these missing feature, and also implementing the JIT and AOT (Ahead of Time) compilers for YARV. YARV will also compile direct to C code.

We wish Koichi good luck in his goals!

"Test::Unit".downcase.sub(/::/,"/") (Nathaniel Talbott)

Nathaniel shared some insights into his understanding of the "Ruby Way" and how it has changed over the years. He has applied these insights toward building a more Rubyesque testing framework.

Stuff coming to test/unit:

• Easier to write parts of the test suites (runners, assertions, etc)
• Reloadable runners.
• Using test metadata
• Declarative test syntax (i.e. a Domain Specific Language for specifying tests).

    suite do
      setup { ... setup stuff ... }
      setup_once {  ... setup once ... }
      t do
        assert_this ...
        assert_that ...
      end
    end
  

• Inline test that exist in the same file as your code.
• The ability to put examples in your class and use them as documentation.
  • e.g. example { assert_equal 2, Adder.add(1,1) }

I’m really excited about these changes. Testing in ruby is already easy, but these changes will make it even more flexible. Cool!

Surprise Presentation (Shashank Date)

Bill Venners has contacted the Ruby community about creating a web-based zine focused on Ruby. Shashank has agreed to be the editor and he has an advisory board to help him review the submitted articles. This is just a pre-announcement, there will be something more formal around the first of the year.

(RubyConf Blackout)

Sometime during the afternoon internet access through the wireless link was lost. I can only imagine the reaction in the rest of the Ruby world as suddenly everyone at the conference went silent on the #ruby-lang IRC channel. We’re back now, but I still don’t know about the details.

Dinner … Meal supplied by Infoether

Objective-C: A Retrospective (Brad Cox)

Mr. Cox started with a review of Objective-C, some of its history and some small details of its implementation. Objective-C is used to write most of the Mac software these days.

After the Objective-C talk, Mr. Cox explored some ideas in the nature of software economics. He made the following observations.

• Hardware is made of atoms
  • Abides by physical convservation lays
  • You can buy, sell and own it
• Software is made of bits
  • Immune to physical conservation laws
  • You can’t buy, sell and own it.
• Implications
  • Copyright based compensation cannot work
  • Advertising based compensation (TV model)
  • Useright base compensation never tried.

Given the above, Mr. Cox is advocating a pay-by-use/micropayments system where some kind of accounting system tracks the number of times you call a function (string compare for example) and charges your bank account for the use. Considering that a good portion of the conference attendees are open source advocates, there was a good deal of push back on these ideas. I think I see where Mr. Cox was going, he wants to create an economic system that pumps revenue into the creation of software. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that his approach really addresses the non-tangible nature of software that he identified earlier. Nevertheless, he provided some food for thought.

You can see some of Mr. Cox’s ideas at virtualschool.edu/mybank/

Evening Activities

After the keynote talk, a good number of attendees migrated to the hotel lobby (where they have WiFi access). I didn’t see a lot of programming, but there was a lot of conversations. I started out by catching up with David Black, and then spent some time with Shashank showing him RubyGems and talking about Rake. Shashank wants to use Rake to control distributed processes, so we experimented with spawning threads from within Rake. The next step would have tasks sending commands to Rake-like Drb servers to run jobs on remote systems. It really won’t be hard to do at all.

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RubyX (John Knight)

John gave a short presentation about the RubyX project, which is a linux distribution that uses Ruby in some manner. I’m a little unclear on exactly how Ruby is used in the project, but John is advocating that folks who are interested take a look at it and supported it.

Ruby on Windows (Dan Berger)

Dan has been using Ruby on windows and realized Ruby seriously lagged behind both Perl and Python in supporting the windows platform. Dan has been working on the win32util project on RubyForge to address that disparity. Daniel did include the disclaimer that he is not a Microsoft Employee, nor is he paid for this

Dan first talked about setting up services. I’m grabbing a lot of his example code because I have an immediate use for this.

To query about services …

  require "wind32/service"
  include Win32
  Service.services { |service| p service}
  Service.status("ClipSrc")
  Service.getdisplayname("ClipsSrv")

To control a service …

  Service.stop(name)
  Service.start(name)
  Service.pause(name)
  Service.resume(name)
  Service.delete(name)

To create a service …

  require 'win32/service"
  include Win32

  class MyDaemon < Daemon
    def service_main
      # Service code goes here
    rescue Exception => e
      logfile.puts "ERROR: #{e.message}"
      exit
    end
  end

  d = MyDaemon.new
  d.mainloop

To register a service

  serv = Service.new
  serv.create_service { |s|
    s.service_name = "aba"
    s.display_name = "aba"
    s.binary_path_name = "c:\\..."
  }

Daniel covered a number of other utils. In particular he identified a number of things that just work differently, but they are working on unifying the APIs between the two platforms. In particular, the RubyGems team is interested in the popen3 api so that our functional tests could be run on a Windows platform.

How Dynamic Can You Get? (Jamis Buck)

Jamis had the challenging task of convincing a bunch of dynamic language enthuisists that dependency injection can make their already flexible language even more flexible. While dependency injection in a huge advantage in a language like Java, there some questions to how much it adds to Ruby. Copland, a framework for Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control, is very patterned after a Java based framework. I think it would be interesting to Ruby-ize the framework and see what falls out.

Code generation with Ruby in a heterogenous network application (Gorden James Miller)

Gorden needed to get a largish C++ application running on a hardened computer network with a small memory footprint. There are a number of messages involved in the network solution. He used XML to describe the nature of the message and the structures sent with the message. Reading the XML with REXML, he used ERB to provide templates for C++ code generation to handle the messages. I found it fascinating to use ERB for code generation rather than web pages.

There are some more interesting details the type of network they are testing/simulating. The network is only up for brief periods of time and must survive as much as a 90% packet loss.

Lunch

Self-Organizing Afternoon Activities

After lunch, the afternoon was open for talking, programming or whatever else suits your fancy. Here’s some of the stuff I participated in.

• Jim Freeze and I (and later Rich Kilmer) worked up a reasonable Ruby-based domain language for Jim to use to specify some work related config files. This is one of the themes I heard over and over again during the conference.
• David Heinemeier Hansonn decided to include a "Builder style" view into Rails. If your view directory contains a ".rbuild" file, then the file will be invoked with a XML Builder object that you can use to programmatically build your html page. This is an alternative to the rhtml ERB files. Builder probably isn’t a good choice where you have a page designer involved, but it might make sense for a programmer only project, or for generating an RSS style page. David also mentioned something about doing web services with Rails. Now that would be cool.
• Finally, I worked with Chad Fowler and Bruce Williams on the design of the new RubyGems.org website. Chad had a prototype app built, and Bruce started helping him refine it Me? I kibitz-ed and watched for the most part.

Conference Summary

What a weekend! There was an energy about this conference that I hadn’t felt before. The entire community was excited about apps like Rails and the proto-Rite VM (YARV). The ability to talk to folks actually using your software and getting feedback is quite a rush. I received all kinds of good ideas and suggestions. Unfornately, my plate is already full of things to do, so who know when I will get to all these ideas.

Wow, I can’t wait till next year!

• Feedback

Conference Introduction

David Black did his usual "Welcome to RubyConf" thing. Sounds like one or two presenters didn’t make it, so we will be doing some creative scheduling. The new PickAxe books are here, but they won’t be handed out until this afternoon (boo hiss). Oh, well.

Teaching Ruby in a Corporate Environment (Jim Freeze)

Jim is working for an EDA company. His company has established Ruby as the "knighted" language for development in this company consisting of mainly Electrical Engineers. Jim has a 3 day course on teaching Ruby to the EEs. It is oriented toward coding neophytes. I really appreciated his examples that were targetted for particular kinds of engineers.

Ruby as Maestro (Rich Kilmer)

Rich’s talk was a last minute addition to the presentation list to make up for a missing presenter. Rich’s company used Ruby to automate a component based blackboard system running on more than 300 nodes. The active agent program is a huge distributed java program, but Ruby is used to configure, build and control the system.

Rich’s project uses one of my favorite features of Ruby … the ability to create domain specific languages for specific purposes.

  wait_for "SocietyQuiesced", 2.hours do
    do_action "StopCommunications"
    do_action "StopSociety"
  end

(an aside)

There seems to be a running commentary on IRC #ruby-lang if you want to listen in.

Lunch Break

Using and Extending Ruwiki (Austin Ziegler)

Ruwiki looks like a very promising wiki clone. I’ve considered using it for my comments page. Ruwiki is very extensible (tweakable markup, different markup engines, different storage backends, etc.).

(another aside)

Bill Kleb from Langley just asked for help getting Ruby to run on the IA64 architecture.

Tycho: A Proposed Ruby-based PIM (Hal Fulton)

Hal talks about his implementation of a Personal Information Manager inspired by Info Select (a.k.a. Tornado). Tycho looks like a rather interesting way to organize information. The executable node feature could do some really interesting things (I’m thinking of a contact list that could dial your phone for you … Ok, that’s lame, but you get the idea)

Pickaxe II

Woohoo! Time to hand out the PickAxe II books.

Hacking Ruby (Paul Brannon)

Paul shares some ideas about hacking ruby code … i.e. messing around with Ruby internals, changing the meaning of built-in functions and classes, and generally having fun.

Alph (Rich Kilmer)

         In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
      A stately pleasure dome decree
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
           Down to a sunless sea.

Alph is a Ruby/Flash bridge allowing you to write Ruby code to control a flash application. Now that sounds simple, but there are really "interesting" hoop Rich had to jump through to get here.

Rich always thinks big. MacroMedia’s new license scheme for the layout managers makes it impossible to use layout managers with Rich’s scheme (without paying a lot of money). So, Rich is thinking about implementing an open source component library to run on the Flash VM. (note to self: Never piss off Rich)

After Conference Activities …

The formal part of the conference was over around 9:30 and we had to vacate the meeting room so that the hotel could lock it up. A large fraction of the conference attendees drifted into the hotel lobby and claimed any spot that was near a power out to continue talking and hacking. Here’s a quick rundown on some of the mini-gatherings:

• Charlie Mills was helping Bill Kleb get Ruby compiled for the IA64 archtecture. Charlie is the fellow who helped Rich Kilmer and Chad Fowler with their DNSSD service wrapper at OSCON this year. It looked like Bill and Charlie had some success by disabling optimization on the C compiler.
• At least on person was working on their presentation for the next day.
• There was a fairly large group talking to Charles L. Perkins regarding the history of Smalltalk. Charles was involved with the early Xerox Parc Place developers and had some good inside stories about the early days of Smalltalk. Later when I dropped by it sounded as if they had moved past Smalltalk history and were discussing some of the capabilities of Prolog.
• Right next to the Smalltalk history group was another cluster of folks watching as David Heinemeier Hansson helped Jim Freeze through a tutorial on Rails. I’ve used Rails a little bit and am very impressed with the framework. When I dropped by, Jim had just got a login screen working for the demo weblog.
• Chad Fowler was helping Shashank Date work on Gemifying some of the windows tools that Shashank is planning on releasing. This is where I landed for a while. By the end of the evening, we had Shashank’s WxRuby application running as a gem.

Oh, and by the way, it looks like Genx4R is the 100th ruby app/library to be packaged as a Gem.

(More Ruby Fun tomorrow)

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