December 20, 2006

Niche Ruby Libraries
Post by Peter Cooper

There are a lot of libraries that don't get much attention on Ruby Inside or the other primary Ruby blogs because their featureset is too niche or location specific, and most readers would not find them interesting.

Of course, this can leave the libraries hidden to those who actually would find them extremely useful, so today we're going to fly through several such libraries. Even if none of these libraries interest you, hopefully they demonstrate the wide variety of Ruby developers interests worldwide.

Hebrew Date Conversion

Hebruby is a Hebrew date conversion library for Ruby. It's available as a gem, and allows you to quickly convert between Julian and Hebrew dates. Hebrew dates can be displayed in either Hebrew or transliterated into English.

German Bank Details

KtoBlzCheck is a library that interfaces with C library 'libktoblzcheck' to check German bank account numbers and bank codes. It was developed by VDP Software (who, it seems, might be worth contacting if you need any German specific development work doing).

Neuronal Network Extension

Neuro provides a "2-Layer Back Propogation" neural network which, supposedly, can be used to categorize datasets. It allows the storage of these networks to disk for future retrieval. A bit above me, but it has been mentioned here and there so someone's enjoying it!

Bible Reference Parser

Bible 1.0.1 is a library designed to parse Bible references and retrieve their texts from the Web.

The author says:

Mainly, an interactive application for retrieving and displaying books, chapters, and verses. Once installed, type "bible" to start an interactive session. A wide variety of references are supported:

Gen 1 # first chapter of Genesis
Genesis 1 # Full names supported
1 Kgs 1 - 2 # 1st and 2nd chapter in 1 Kings
Luke 15:8-10 # Specific verses from chapters supported
Luke 15:1-7, 11-32 # Multiple, disjoint verse specification
Matt 9:12; Mark 2:17; Luke 5: 31 # Multiple books together
Gen 1, 3 # discontinuous chapters
Gen 1 - 2:3 # Span chapters, to a specific verse

Besides the abbreviations listed above, most common names for books can be used ( i.e. "1 Kings", "Matthew", etc.). Other common means of separating chapters and verses may also be used (e.g. "Lk 15.11-32", "Genesis 1; 3", etc.). My motivation for writing this library was to be able copy verse references off web pages and paste them into the console with little or no change, so the parser is pretty flexible.

It's not a waste of time ;-)

And if you're wondering.. this day is pretty crummy, well.. I've found a whole ton of stuff I didn't think was 'niche' enough for this page that will be featured in several exciting Ruby Inside posts soon.. so it's all worthwhile ;-)