The Idea Ether

RubyGems Lives!

Well, RubyConf 2003 is wrapped up and I am here at the Austin Airport with Chad Fowler and Jim Weirich. We had a great time...lots of great speakers, food and break-talks. On Friday we were there in a roundtable with Matz and someone brought up package management for Ruby (again!). Matz said if someone built a good one, he would include it in Ruby. So Chad, myself, Jim, David Black and Paul Brannan decided to just do it. We have two nights...let's build RubyGems!

We paired up and attacked the problem Friday night from 9 pm to 2 am, then a bit of discussion during the day on Saturday (and a bit of coding during the talks...shh), then Saturday night from 9 pm to 1 am and our results are up on RubyForge here.

We got an impressive start (code committed). We have Gem building, installation, uninstall, version support, dependency support, and apt-get like capability (for network installs). Of course, its really simple to use (thanks Ruby/Matz).

Here is a gemspec for Jabber4r:

require 'rubygems'
spec = Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.add_dependency('rexml', '> 2.7.0')
  s.name = 'jabber4r'
  s.version = "0.5.0"
  s.platform = Gem::Platform::RUBY
  s.summary = "Jabber4r is a pure-Ruby Jabber client library"
  s.requirements << 'Jabber server'
  s.files = Dir.glob("lib/**/*").delete_if {|item| item.include?("CVS")}
  s.require_path = 'lib'
  s.autorequire = 'jabber4r/jabber4r'
  s.author = "Richard Kilmer"
  s.email = "[email protected]"
  s.rubyforge_project = "jabber4r"
  s.homepage = "http://jabber4r.rubyforge.org"
end
if $0==__FILE__
  Gem::Builder.new(spec).build
end

Pretty spiffy. You execute that with:

ruby jabber4r.gemspec
Successfully built RubyGem
  Name: jabber4r
  Version: 0.5.0
  File: jabber4r-0.5.0.gem

That generates the .gem file (with version) and you install like this:

sudo ruby jabber4r-0.5.0.gem
Successfully installed jabber4r version 0.5.0

Then to use it:

irb -r rubygems
> require_gem 'jabber4r'
true

Gems manage the $LOAD_PATH of Ruby which lets two different versions of a Gem be installed and two scripts could each use the one they want. The gem --remote-install will be available once a service goes up on RubyForge. For now, you can serve Gems off of your machine to anyone on your local network.

I will post more about RubyConf soon.

Off to RubyConf 2003

I am off to the third International Ruby Conference. The first two were great, and I am sure this one will be as well. I am speaking on Sunday on my Ruby Java Debug Wire Protocol library which lets you debug Java programs from Ruby scripts across a network (or in machine). I will also be unveiling a little GUI framework I've been cooking up. Although Ruby has several bindings to graphics APIs, it does not have anything that truly differentiates it. I think this will be different ;-)

Semantic Web...show me da code.

Well, well. There is a flurry of activity in the Semantic Web world today. Clay Shirky (who I really like and admire) wrote this wonderful devastating piece about how the Semantic Web is doomed to fail. Tim Bray wrote a counter-piece here.

Interesting perspectives, but I think rather than getting into whether the Semantic Web will succeed or fail I propose another approach. I like to speak in code (computer source code that is). Let's just see if over the next year I can show something that leverages OWL, is so easy to use you don't realize you are using it, and has high value.

Oh, and I am not one of these guys that is hung up on the whole knowledge representation thing. I really like writing dynamic OO code which is why Ruby is my language is choice these days. I like building things that, while perhaps not mathematically provable, are very functional and solve real problems.

Fall in Virginia

Well, I posted my first photo album as part of my blog. Its some pictures I took over the last few weeks of the fall colors here in Northern Virginia. You can see the album here. I took these with my Canon G2 (4M pixels). If anyone wants a higher resolution version of any of these pictures just email me here.