GTK is accessible through several programming languages, such as C++, Guile, Perl,Python, TOM, Ada95, Objective C, Free Pascal, Eiffel, Java, and C#. This document covers Ruby/GTK2, the Ruby binding for the GTK library version 2. The reader should have some Ruby knowledge. It would be better if he/she has some experience on X programming, but this is not required.This document is still under construction. Do not hesitate to send comments or as questions to the mailing list. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Thin is a new web server which has been written by Marc-André Cournoyer that uses the EventMachine, Rack and Mongrel libraries. EventMachine makes it super fast at processing network I/O, Rack makes it easy to integrate with existing Ruby Web app frameworks, and Mongrel helps it parse HTTP.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the Ruby on Rails web development framework demonstrates how to create a blog engine in 15 minutes.   

 

{mos_sb_discuss:50} What to do if you need to extract data from a document that’s supposed to be HTML or XML, but that contains some invalid markup.

{mos_sb_discuss:50}  Ruby has all the usual control structures, such as if statements and while loops. Java, C, and Perl programmers may well get caught by the lack of braces around the bodies of these statements. Instead, Ruby uses thekeyword end to signify the end of a body. 

{mos_sb_discuss:50}  Ruby’s arrays and hashes are indexed collections. Both store collections of objects, accessible using a key. With arrays, the key is an integer, whereas hashes support any object as a key. Both arrays and hashes grow as needed to hold new elements. It’s more efficient to access array elements, but hashes provide more flexibility. Any particular array or hash can hold objects of differing types; you can have an array containing an integer, a string, and a floating-point number, for example.

{mos_sb_discuss:50} Here’s a Ruby class definition. class Order < ActiveRecord::Base    has_many :line_items     def self.find_all_unpaid        find(:all, 'paid = 0')     end   def total      sum = 0      line_items.each {|li| sum += li.total}     end  end

{mos_sb_discuss:50} One of the most interesting (and powerful) features of JRuby is the ability to access and manipulate Java classes and libraries. The code below creates, configures and starts an instance of an ActiveMQ Broker that accepts connections based on the Stomp protocol.

{mos_sb_discuss:50} I have occasionally participated in conversations around the subject of the database as a product with an expiry date, destined to eventually be replaced by highly distributed data storage models. Given the current technological state, this sounds much a like science fiction scenario, but services like AWS S3 bring the idea closer to science and further from fiction.