News

Yuki Sonoda has just announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1 Release Candidate 1 on the ruby-talk mailing list:

The Government of Fukuoka Japan, together with the Fukuoka Ruby Award Selection Committee, is running the 2009 Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition. In short, they're trying to raise public awareness of the growing software industry in Japan but also Ruby in general.

If you read Ruby Inside in 2006, you might remember our 2006 Ruby Advent Calendar. It featured the first look at the then-new AWS::S3 library, offered a Ruby code formatter for blog posts (which I still use here!), some Ruby wallpapers, and a lot more.

Back in March, Ruby developer Gregory Brown raised the idea of receiving donations so he could work on open source Ruby projects full-time. It went well, and out of this project came Prawn, a pure Ruby PDF generation library. Not one to rest on his laurels, Gregory's now working on a book for O'Reilly called Ruby Best Practices, billed as "for programmers who want to use Ruby the way Rubyists do." The book will cover how to design "beautiful" APIs and DSLs, along with lots of other general topics that will make your code more expressive and make you a better Ruby developer into the bargain.

Merb - a much heralded, highly flexible Ruby-based Web application framework - has reached version 1.0 after two years of development. Congratulations to Merb's creator, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and to the large group of associated developers (such as Yehuda Katz and Matt Aimonetti) who've kept adding features and pushed Merb forward to be a significant alternative to Rails.

Happy Election Night!

Here's the latest events news in the Ruby and Rails worlds as of November, 2008. Please comment if you have other events to mention - people will see them, and we can possibly mention them on the next post:

In an understated post on the official Ruby blog last night, Yugui (Yuki Sonoda) announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1-preview 1.

When Ruby Inside started over two years ago, there were only a handful of sources for Ruby related news. The announcements on the ruby-talk mailing list (which Ruby Weekly News - now deceased - rounded up on the Web), del.icio.us, and a few popular Rubyists blogs (such as Why's Redhanded). Now, however, there are lots of options, including Ruby Inside itself, Rails Inside, RubyFlow, Ruby Reddit, and Planet Ruby on Rails.

Following on from the highly successful MerbCamp, the Merb Framework took another big step this week with the announcement of the availability of release candidate 2 for it's upcoming 1.0 release (due within weeks now). No major changes and The Merbist blog lists mainly a focus on bug fixes and Windows compatibility:

A brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) - Mobile Orchard.

A week ago, in a story published by eWeek.com, Darryl K. Taft asked "Can Ruby and Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?"

MacRuby - a Mac OS X port of Ruby 1.9 designed to run directly on top of OS X's frameworks - recently hit a new milestone with the release of MacRuby 0.3.

Here's the latest events news in the Ruby and Rails worlds! Please make sure to post a comment if you have events to mention or tell us via the Contact page.

We first covered Mack in April, when I billed it as a "fast, best of the rest, Web app framework." Mack, a Ruby-based Web application framework, developed by a team led by Mark Bates, has continued to grow over the past several months and today announced a significant release, Mack 0.7.0.

While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.

Photo by JL2003 - CC 2.0 Attribution License

There are some really amazing sounding jobs this month! The focus is definitely on Rails - and working environments include the skunkworks at an adult entertainment provider, a gaming startup, a mansion in Los Angeles, and one of the biggest companies in America. All the jobs are in the US, alas, but on both coasts and in-between!

Photo credit: Blakespot. License: CC 2.0 Attribution