The Idea Ether

FOSDEM Talk on Ruby

I am going to be speaking at FOSDEM in February on Ruby. FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting and is being held in Brussels Belgium on February 21-22, 2004. It will be fun to share the excellence of Ruby with such and excellent group! I conducted an intereview earlier in the month and it can be found here.

The Alph Project?

The Alph Project is a bridge between two language runtimes; the Ruby interpreter and the Macromedia Flash player. Flash was originally constructed to be an animation runtime and because of this it has attracted a more design-oriented rather then developer-oriented community. The Flash player is actually a stack-based virtual machine which now supports the ability to write graphical component-based applications in the ActionScript 2.0 language. Although Flash and ActionScript are powerful, the downside to developing in it is that each application you build is compiled into a binary (swf) movie, and the main development environment (Macromedia Flash) is a commercial (> $500) product. Although the Flash development tools are commercial, the player runtime is free and cross-platform.

Alph will create a free, open-source alternative for constructing dynamic Flash-based interfaces in pure Ruby and aims to be an unique, comprehensive user interface framework. Alph ships with a single binary (swf) file that when executed connects to the Ruby-based service (which could be in-machine or network/web-based). This single swf file contains all the Flash 2.0 components compiled in with a network protocol handler, method dispatcher, and event manager which allows Flash-based interfaces to be created at run-time by Ruby over a TCP/IP socket. Ruby programs will have access to the full version 2 GUI component model of Flash 2004 without the commercial costs of existing Flash tools, and those Flash interfaces will have the full power of Ruby (and its library of extensions) behind them.

I originally demonstrated an Alph interface during my RubyJDWP presentation at the Third Annual Ruby Conference in November. I am currently working (as free time allows) on getting this fully running, and will be posting the source to the Alph Project website when it gets in a state where it is possible for others to develop with. I expect the code to be online by the end of January. As I make progress, I will keep my blog up to date with interesting tidbits and things I'm learning along the way.

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 ;-)

Ruby 1.8.1 Preview 2 Released

Quickly following the release of preview 1 of Ruby 1.8.1, preview 2 was released by Matz today. Preview 1 (which I blogged on a bit earlier) left out a header file that broke the build. Tom Copeland mirrored it on RubyForge here. Matz also indicated that the final 1.8.1 release will be out within about 2 weeks. Cool!

Ruby 1.8.1 Preview 1 Released

Matz has posted the first preview of Ruby 1.8.1. Lots of little fixes in here from the 1.8 release. This should transition to a 1.8.1 release soon. Tom Copeland mirrored the download of it on RubyForge here.

Thanks Matz (and Tom).

Building Ruby 1.8.1 on Panther

Well, last Friday was my day for Panther. Since I pre-ordered it, my disks arrived early in the afternoon. It was one of the most painless upgrades I have ever performed, while having some really great new features. Of course, shortly after my install, I needed to install the latest version of Ruby. I tried (with a lot of help from James Duncan Davidson) to get Ruby 1.8 in Panther, but it was too late. In order to proceed with with the steps below you need to install the xCode developer's tools that come with Panther.

So, here it goes:

1) Make yourself a directory to build your stuff in (like build) and enter that directory.

2) A great tool that comes with Ruby is irb (Interactive Ruby). One really nice thing in irb is using the up arrow to recall previous lines of typed in Ruby code. The problem is this depends on readline which is not included in Panther. So, we need to install readline prior to installing Ruby. You can do it after, but its more of a PITA.

$ curl -o readline-4.3.tar.gz \
   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-4.3.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf readline-4.3.tar.gz
$ cd readline-4.3
$ perl -i.bak -p -e \
  "s/SHLIB_LIBS=.*/SHLIB_LIBS='-lSystem -lncurses -lcc_dynamic'/g" \
  support/shobj-conf
$ ./configure 
$ make
$ sudo make install
password: (your password)
$ cd ..

Note: That perl hack was found to fix a linking problem.

3) UPDATED: Now onto my favorite programming language. Ruby 1.8.1 is the current stable release, and it should be the version built. From the command line do the following:

$ curl -o ruby-1.8.1.tar.gz \
   "http://rubyforge.org/download.php/262/ruby-1.8.1.tar.gz"
$ tar -xzf ruby-1.8.1.tar.gz  

4) Build and install Ruby.

$ cd ruby-1.8.1
$ autoconf
$ ./configure

Its worth discussing here that when you run ./configure you can specify the prefix for installation with --prefix. It defaults to /usr/local (which is not included in the default path for Panther's terminal). I leave it in /usr/local even though the Ruby that ships with Panther is in /usr so that I can keep the old version around (for Apple updates, etc). Anyway...

$ make
$ make test
$ sudo make install
password: (your password)

5) Update your path to include /usr/local/bin. I am still running tcsh instead of bash (since the Panther upgrade honored my existing shell...thanks Apple!). Anyway, once you do that test out Ruby and verify its installation:

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.1 (2003-10-24) [powerpc-darwin]

Cool!

BTW: I am going to try and build a .dmg file of this Ruby build for simple installation by folks that don't want to go through these kind of low-level steps.