Recently I’ve been using YAML files along with some Ruby scripts as a simple and convenient mechanism for importing content into our database. The YAML files will be maintained by content authors, and one of the questions that came up is that of validation. Luckily, there’s a very nice solution in form of Kwalify, a small schema validator for YAML. Conceptionally, it is similar to the corresponding XML technologies such as XML Schema or RelaxNG....
The last time I mentioned the RDT (aka RubyEclipse) project about two months ago, I thought that development on this otherwise promising project had stalled. Since then I’ve started lurking on the RDT development mailing list, and I was happy to notice that the project appeared to be picking up speed again. The developers are realizing that Ruby is commanding significant interest these days, not least because of the Ruby on Rails framework that is gaining a lot of traction....
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....