JRuby

Here is the announcement sent out this morning: The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.0.1. Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/ Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/ JRuby 1.0.1 is a minor release of our stable ... [More] branch.  The fixes for this release are obvious compatibility issues that we feel are low risk.  Our intention is to periodically push out point releases to help better support production uses of JRuby. Highlights: - Fixed a issue which caused most multipart processing to not work - Fixed issue with sockets that affected some aspects of net/* libraries - Fixed network timeout issue for large packets - 28 issues resolved Key                Summary JRUBY-1080     Kernel#system behaves differently under MRI and JRuby for missing commands JRUBY-1108     IOError exception in Net::FTP using 1.0.0RC3 under WinXP JRUBY-1110     Concurrent modification exception when exiting IRB JRUBY-1119     FTP.nlst error !!! JRUBY-1120     Implementing BigDecimal.mode() JRUBY-1131     RubyFileTest fails to be compiled in Eclipse JRUBY-1132     $! gets set to 'uninitialized constant RAILS_FRAMEWORK_ROOT' after Rails Initializer run - inconsistent with MRI JRUBY-1150     Multipart Uploads still fails. JRUBY-1156     Implementing BigDecimal.power() JRUBY-1162     Dump invocations in maven build JRUBY-1169     YAML parser do not escape nested yaml string correctly JRUBY-1174     Ranges in if and if_mod evaluate incorrectly JRUBY-1181     Rake batch file for Windows environments JRUBY-1191     method() on alias calls wrong super (but not in our opinion) JRUBY-1200     commit #3984 breaks Webrick startup: active_support/dependencies.rb:266:in `load_missing_constant' JRUBY-1206     Form's with enctype="multipart/form-data" fail in JRuby/Rails JRUBY-1220     YAML dump is broken for multi-line string values with leading space JRUBY-1228     TCPSocket.open will not accept a string for the port parameter JRUBY-1239     Monitor synchronize hangs JRUBY-1244     [PATCH] ENV variables should be removed from the environment when set to nil JRUBY-1245     [PATCH] File.mtime should raise exception if file is not found JRUBY-1247     ShellLauncher command line parsing does not handle embedded quotes JRUBY-1248     [PATCH] StringIO.puts shouldn't append \n if it's already there JRUBY-1255     [PATCH] Indented heredoc trims trailing '\n' characters JRUBY-1266     TCPServer doesn't close connection properly using blocks JRUBY-1270     Unable to round trip paritcular forms of strings using YAML JRUBY-1271     Jruby error on loading ActiveMerchant plugin JRUBY-1280     Hash#select block parameter semantics are not cRuby compatible [Less]

If someone is interested in the presentation I did at javaBin in Bergen and Oslo, it can be found here.

Since the current world is moving away from languages in the classical imperative paradigm, it's more and more important to understand the fundamental type differences between programming languages. I've seen over and over that this is still ... [More] something people are confused by. This post won't give you all you need - for that I recommend Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott, a very good book.Right now, I just wanted to minimize the confusion that abounds surrounding two ways of categorizing programming languages. Namely strong versus weak typing and dynamic versus static typing.The first you need to know is that these two typings are independent of each other, meaning that there are four different types of languages.First, strong vs weak: A strongly typed language is a language where a value always have the same type, and you need to apply explicit conversions to turn a value into another type. Java is a strongly typed language. Conversely, C is a weakly typed language.Secondly, dynamic vs static: A static language can usually be recognized by the presence of a compiler. This is not the full story, though - there are compilers for Lisp and Smalltalk, which are dynamic. Static typing basically means that the type of every variable is known at compile time. This is usually handled by either static type declarations or type inference. This is why Scala is actually statically typed, but looks like a dynamic language in many cases. C, C , Java and most mainstream languages are statically typed. Visual Basic, JavaScript, Lisp, Ruby, Smalltalk and most "scripting" languages are dynamically typed.See, that's not too hard, is it? So, when I say that Ruby is a strongly, dynamically typed language, you know what that means?C is a actually an interesting beast to classify. It's the only weakly, statically typed language I can think of right now. Anyone has any more examples?To find out more, read the book above, or look up "Type systems" on Wikipedia. [Less]

I'm right now in Bergen, but I'm flying to Oslo later today - I'll basically land and head directly to the javaBin meeting. Afterwards I'm up for beers or something, if someone wants to.On Friday I'm heading for Sweden. For purely recreational ... [More] purposes. I'll be in Gothenburg, Malmö and Stockholm for a week or so, so if someone feels like saying hi, do tell. I always like good discussions about programming languages. And other things as well, in fact. [Less]

OMG NetBeans Ruby support is so awesome. I just picked up some of the recent dailies, and it does stuff I just can't believe. But don't take my word for it.Today I stumbled back into the NetBeans Ruby Wiki, expecting to just find the same old "how to ... [More] download", "how to install", and "how to build" instructions. Instead I find a nicely-organized set of pages describing (with screenshots!) all of the really awesome features.Refactoring? Check. Debugging? Check. YAML and RHTML editing? Check. Test running? Check.It just goes on and on.If you haven't given it a try, and you're a Ruby programmer, you owe it to yourself to check it out. And if you ph34r a gigantic IDE download with support for Java and UML and BPEL and other stuff you'll never used, there's a Ruby-only IDE available too; check the Installation page. Incredible.Direct links to feature pages:RubyEditing describes the editing features available. RubyRefactoring describes the refactoring features available. RubyProjects describes the project features available. RubyOnRails describes the Ruby On Rails features available. RubyDebugging describes the debugging features available. RubyTesting describes the testing features available. RubyCodeTemplates describes the live code templates feature. RubyHints describes the quickfixes and hints feature. RubyShortcuts lists keyboard shortcuts relevant to Ruby [Less]

Now, this is totally awesome. Jay found a way to implement generic comprehensions in Ruby. In twenty lines of code. It's really quite obvious when you look at it. An example:(1..100).find_all &it % 2 == 0%w'sdfgsdfg foo bazar ... [More] bara'.sort_by(&its.length).map &it.reverse.capitalize%w'sdfgsdfg foo bazar bara'.map &:to_sym%w'sdfgsdfg foo bazar bara'.map &it.to_symNow, the last two lines are what I like the most. The Symbol to_proc tric is widely used, but I actually think the comprehension version is more readable. It's even better if replacing "map " with "collect".This is actually real fun. You can link how many methods you like - you can send arguments to the methods, you can send blocks to them, you can link and nest however you want. It apples for Arrays, Sets, Hashes - everything you can send a block to can use this, so it's not limited to collections or anything like that.I think it's really, really cool, and it should be part of Facets, ActiveSupport, hell, the Ruby core library. I want it there.Now, the only, only, only quibble I have with it... He choose to call it "The Methodphitamine". You should actually use 'require "methodphitamine"'. It's a gem. I love it. But I hate the name. So, read more in his blog, here: http://jicksta.com/articles/2007/08/04/the-methodphitamine. [Less]

So, I had a great time at the London RUG tonight, and Jay Phillips managed to show me two really neat Ruby tricks. The first one is in this post, and the next one is about the second.Now, Ruby has a limited amount of operator overloading, but that is ... [More] in most cases limited by what is predefined. There is actually a category of operators that are not available be the regular syntax, but that can still be created. I'm talking about almost all the regular single operators followed by either a plus sign or a minus sign.Right now, I don't have a perfect example of where this is useful, but I guess someone will come up with it. You can use it in all cases where you want to be able to use stuff like binary , binary --, /-, * , *-, %-, % , %^, and so forth.This trick makes use of the parsing of unary operators combined with binary operators. So, for example, this code:module FixProxy; endclass String def @ extend FixProxy end alias __old_plus def (val) if val.kind_of?(FixProxy) __old_plus(" BAR " << val) else __old_plus(val) end endendputs("Foo" "Baz") will actually output "Foo BAR Baz".I'm pretty certain someone kind find a good use for it. [Less]

Anyone showing up for the London RUG tonight? Seems like it will be interesting: Ruby2Ruby and ParseTree, and also Jay Phillips about Adhearsion (which is really cool).I will not be presenting, so don't worry about that. =)Hope to see you there.

So, it seems someone stepped up to the challenge and started working on ActiveHibernate from me initial idea. The code got pushed online a while back and I have finally had the time to look at it. Over all it looks really nice.Of course, it's very ... [More] early times. I've submitted some patches making the configuration aspect easier and more AcitveRecord like - but it's going to be important to have access to all the features of Hibernate too. When in the balance, I don't think we should aim for total ActiveRecord equivalence.Read more here and find the Google Code project here.I would encourage everyone interested in a merger between Rails and Hibernate to take a look at this. Now is the time to come with advice on how it should work, what it should do and how it should look like. [Less]

I am a speaker at RailsConf Europe in Berlin. I'm going to talk about JRuby on Rails at ThoughtWorks. Hopefully many of you'll make it there! As far as I know, it seems the whole core JRuby team may be together for the first time ever, so it's going to be a great conference for JRuby.See you in Berlin!