corigin.com

I keep putting off this Ruby News Survey piece because there keeps being
more news, but hey, you have to pull the trigger sometime.

1.9

Check out Tor Norbye’s write-up on
using
NetBeans to migrate to 1.8.

Sam Ruby reported at length on
Porting REXML to Ruby 1.9
and, get this, check
what
happened to his patch.
Sam
hasn’t
stopped.

Rubinius

First of all,
it runs IRB; I remember the JRuby
guys having surprising difficulty there; thus this has to be a real milestone.

Engine Yard is Rubinius World
Headquarters, and they just
took
a butt-load of money from Benchmark Capital.
Frankly, I’m dubious about the value of most Venture Capital investments in
the modern Web economy; but if it keeps Rubinius moving along it’s A Good
Thing.

Rails

Shortly after I
predicted good times
for Rails, there was the infamous
Zed rant
which is worth reading, not for the morsels of truth possibly burrowed in the
billows of bile, but for the flame itself, which is monumental in its scope
and ambition. Sample: “Jesus fucking christ on a goddamned pike you absolute
mother fucking donkey dick sucking morons get a fucking grip!”
The production is so obviously staged that it’s hard to get mad at its
infantile drama-queen rhetoric; but I’ll make an exception for Zed’s dissing
the people coming over to Rails from PHP; it’s a good thing if people
who haven’t spent years on the theory can still build decent Web sites.

For the kinder, gentler, Zed, read Joe Gregorio’s
Tim Bray on
Ruby on Rails, which sees Rails as being in decline (but read Joe’s
commenters too).
I find that really hard to believe, since more or less everything Web-related
is growing, it’s the relative speeds that matter; but the January
Tiobe Index is interesting.
Python, you know, not much hype but lots of real work getting done.

Frameworks

You know, it’s not all Rails any more. Camping, Merb, and hey, here’s the
pretty nice looking
Ramaze which thoughtfully includes a list of
other Ruby Web frameworks.
I call that damn sporting.

Performance Picture

Check out the second graphic in Dion Hinchcliffe’s
Creating Open
Web APIs: Exploring REST and WOA in Rails 2.0. Dion deploys a few too
many words and pictures for my taste, but the graphic entitled “21st Century
Web Development” is thought-provoking.

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Check out Antonio Cangiano’s
The
Great Ruby Shootout, which addresses the vexed question of Ruby
performance, takes names and hands out numbers. Damn interesting numbers,
too, if not terribly surprising. You want surprising?
Engine Yard, which already employs
Rubinius Guy
Evan Phoenix, has just
hired
Ryan Davis and Eric Hodel to work on Rubinius. Holy crap. That makes
four Ruby-implementor teams with multiple people grinding
away at the problem full time. This is what they call good news.
Meanwhile, the Mac corner of the Ruby World is glowing with scarlet
Ruby love.

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