P@ Sunglasses
e enjte janar 27, 2005
Learning Ruby: a few refs 
Like all java geeks I've been learning Ruby recently: it's always refreshing to learn new ways of thinking about things. In Ruby the main way to think about programming is in terms of iterators and blocks.
A few references for my friend Erwan:
- Programming Ruby aka the Pickaxe, by our friends the pragmatic programmers. Dense, terse, fun, as all their books. It's the classic for Ruby. I had a similar pleasure reading it as when I read Programming Perl many years ago (except that I never finished Programming Perl, and very quickly did not have any occasion anymore to practice what I had learnt). Start with the Pickaxe.
- Ruby homepage: the Ruby official homepage, Ruby Application Archive, to search for Gems, and RubyForge listing Ruby projects.
- Rolling with Ruby on Rails at O'Reilly, by Curt Hibbs, from last week: a very windowish tutorial (pages of screenshots to explain what would be done with a few commandlines on a Unix system) but it explains very clearly the basics of the Rails Ruby webapp MVC framework (I guess O'Reilly's target audience is changing these days:-).
- JRuby: a ruby interpreter in java. Get the best of both worlds, Ruby for the higher level logic, and all the power of your favorite java libraries. Or embed Ruby in your favorite app server. They released a 0.8 version 4 days ago, with full support for Ruby 1.8.x grammar.
- Thanks to James Britt for pointing out in a comment the very good rubydoc weblog, a blog about new Ruby documentation.
I have a few pet project ideas that I want to do in Ruby: let's see how pleasurable it is to code with!
( Jan 27 2005, 10:40:14 PD PST ) Permalink Comments [2] Chat about it
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Why is Google interested in Java and Mozilla ?
Pourquoi Google s'interesse a Java et Mozilla ? is a very good analysis of the recent Google hiring moves for java and Mozilla engineers. It's in french, but Google is your friend and here's how they would translate it (thanks to the anonymous commenter who posted this link).
Ludovic expresses in very clear terms what I was thinking since a while. Ludo and I were at Netscape together, when the strategy was to make the OS irrelevant by having the browser be the platform for most applications. I guess Netscape was too early in this game, but Google has much more chances to make it work now.
The only point I would add to Ludo's analysis is that I think Google will add java on the client as well, in order to be able to add functionalities to their apps on the fly. If you've ever tried creating an app in Mozilla, you know that all the deep functionality is written in C code, wrapped in XPCOM bindings and accessed from the UI code through javascript. So if you want to add serious services to Mozilla you need to deploy new C libraries with an XPCOM binding. I think Adam Bosworth is going to implement the client side caching/synchronization framework he was talking about when at BEA in their Firefox based browser, but that they will probably add a VM in there, with java-XPCOM bindings (does someone remember the now defunct blackwood project, maybe Google is going to finish the work:-) that will let them provision jars with new functionalities from the network. Then the UI will be written in XUL-javascript. This would be an ironic revival of fortune for java on the client: java on the client, but not for the UI stuff:-)
These are just educated guesses and may prove completely wrong. We'll see. But if you think about it, this was the architecture that Kevin Burton, now chief architect and founder at Rojo, had chosen 2 years ago for his well named Desktop news aggregator NewsMonster.
( Jan 27 2005, 07:28:50 PD PST ) Permalink Comments [3] Chat about it
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