As some of you may know, I’ve been following the Buildr project with a fair degree of interest of late. Just last week, Assaf announced their first release as an Apache project: Buildr 1.3.0. Being of the inquisitive bend, I decided that this would be an excellent time to reevaluate its suitability for use in [...]
JRuby is an amazing bit of programming. It has managed to rise from its humble beginnings as a hobby project on SourceForge to the most viable third-party Ruby implementation currently available. As far as I am aware, JRuby is the only Ruby implementation other than MRI which is capable of running an unmodified Rails application. [...]
XML is probably the most ubiquitous and most recognizable format in the modern development landscape. It’s simple power in representing hierarchically structured data has made it the standard for representing everything from Word documents to databases. It’s also one of the most verbose and meta-rich syntaxes known to man.
So in that sense, XML is a [...]
What’s the first thing you think of when you consider the Ruby Language? Dynamic types, right? Ruby is famous (infamous?) for its extremely flexible type system, and as a so-called “scripting language”, the core of this mechanism is a lack of type checking. This feature allows for some very concise expressions and a great deal [...]
Well, it’s a new year; and apparently no sooner are the resolutions forgotten and the hangovers behind us then the internet en mass decides that we need a new language. Ruby was indisputably the hip language of 2006 and 2007. However, in an opinion shift so sudden as to make one’s head spin, the blogosphere [...]