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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