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)
Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas (aka PragDave) has started a new series of articles about comparing Ruby to other languages. The first article looks at one of the biggest perceived issues, performance. As usual Dave is pragmatic and points out that Ruby is not always the best choice. In most cases however, the relatively small linear performance loss of Ruby compared to, say, J2EE, is negligible when you consider that for a typical enterprise application that does some data shuffling and maybe some basic arithmetic operations, only a small fraction of time (he estimates 5%) is actually spent in code that you write, while the rest of the time is spent on data transfer, database operations (possibly using some kind of object/relational mapping framework), etc....
As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about YAML, here are some links to add YAML support to your favorite editor. Unfortunately, I have been unable to hunt down YAML mode files for vim and emacs, although I saw a vim file mentioned a couple times. Perhaps this is because YAML itself is so lightweight and readable that it really doesn’t require any syntax highlighting. Anyway, if anybody knows the location of these files (or if you are aware of other editors that support YAML), please leave a comment and I’ll update this list....
I’m still (slowly) getting up to speed on Ruby and various associated libraries and frameworks. Tonight I spent some time looking into YAML. I always thought that this stood for “Yet Another Markup Language”, but apparently it actually stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”. Essentially, YAML is a lightweight alternative to XML. As somebody who entered the job market in the late 1990s, XML usually seems to me like the natural choice for expressing data....