Dave Thomas just announced a new Pragmatic Bookshelf series called Pragmatic Fridays. I have no idea what inspired the name “Friday” in this context, but a Pragmatic Friday is a short (60 - 100 pages), low-cost ($7.50 - $10), and focussed book on a specific topic. The books are available for download in PDF form only, and as with all downloadable Pragmatic Bookshelf titles, they contain no DRM. The first Pragmatic Friday title Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby by Caleb Tennis is available for download now, at the price of $8....

I generally try to stay away from writing GUI applications and focus on server side development instead. Still, every once in a while I have an idea for a GUI tool that I’d like to build. My previous post on the upcoming Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby book prompted me to (once again) look into the available GUI toolkits for Ruby. Unlike Java, which has pretty much standardized on the Swing and SWT frameworks, Ruby does not have any clear winners yet....

Here is a nice post on getting started with ActiveRecord migrations. I haven’t played with it yet, but this definitely looks very useful. On my current Rails project, I’ve been going back and forth between using MySQL and using SQLite (although I’m probably sticking with SQLite for now), and I’ve had to manually keep the SQL schema creation scripts in sync between the two databases. Using the database agnostic ActiveRecord syntax sounds like a much cleaner solution....

Martin Fowler has posted a strong endorsement of the Ruby community on his Bliki. Robby has echoed similar sentiments on his Robby on Rails blog. I have not interacted with the Ruby community all that much, but everything I’ve seen so far has been very positive. I’m inclined to agree with Robby that that this is largely due to the cultured nature of many Ruby developers, who come from many other languages such as Java, ....

I just came across Java Web Parts, a collection of open source, lightweight web components such as servlet filters, custom taglibs, utility classes etc. I still need to take a closer look at it, but it looks like there’s some useful functionality. (via TheServerSide.com)