The Third Annual International Ruby Conference was in Austin Texas this year, November 14-16. I’m going to put down a rundown of the conference and some of the after hours activities.

Conference Introduction

Its Friday morning in Austin Texas, and the 3rd Annual International Ruby conference is just beginning. David Black welcomed everyone to the conference. He spoke a few words about RubyCentral, Inc, the organization that sponsors the conference.

Working in the Garden: Web Apps with Borges (Eric Hodel)

At last year’s conference, Avi Bryant demostrated an unusual web application framework that allowed linear programming to be applied to the rather non-linear web. Avi’s ruby framework was a partial port of his Smalltalk framework, Seaside. Seaside uses continuations to allow a user to return the application to an arbitrary earlier point in the program and to make a different decision.

Eric Hodel has done a complete port of Seaside to Ruby. The result is named "Borges". Eric demoed Borges by modeling SushiNet, a sales cart style application for ordering raw fish.

The Seaside/Borges model for web applications is really interesting. It seems to be a good fit for certain types of applications, especially for those that lead the user through a certain set of pages (e.g. the checkout pages for a web shopping site). Now if I could just get my head wrapped around continuations.

The State of XML Processing in Ruby (James Britt)

James points out that using XML these days is much like using ASCII, you really don’t care about the exact representation. You just use the APIs without worrying so much about the gory details. James gave us a survey of the currently available XML tools for Ruby, noting whether they were pure Ruby or C library based, whether they were streaming or DOM like, and gave a summary of there use. I’m not going go through his entire list, it was quite long. If fact, I was a bit surprised at the length of the list.

Object-relational mapping with Lafcadio (Francis Hwang)

Lafcadio is a OO mapping tool, allowing one to deal with objects in their Ruby code while accessing a relational database. Francis wrote Lafcadio for his own use, but appears to be fairly complete.

Lafcadio is specifically designed to support unit testing. Francis uses an interesting mechanism for flexibly controlling singletong instantiation in the framework.

Here are a couple of notes

• I would like to see Lafcadio support more databases. Francis indicated that it would not be hard to add DBI support, but currently MySql is the only supported out of the box.
• Francis talked about better abstractions for queries, but wasn’t aware of Ryan Pavlik’s Criteria library (see my Leaky Abstractions writeup. I think this would be a good match for Lafcadio.
• I asked Francis later about the origin of the name "Lafcadio". He indicated that it came from a children’s book by Shel Silverstein about a lion of the same name. Lafcadio the lion grew up in the jungle, but was transplanted into the world of men. Lafcadio longed for the jungle, but was unable to return after becoming acclimated to his new world. Lafcadio becomes a metaphor for the strange between world of objects coming from a database, but living in the world of objects.

Ruby World: Implemented (Steve Tuckner)

Steve intended to talk about the implementation his Ruby World project, but implementation of Ruby World was delayed. Since David Black (one of the conference organizers) wouldn’t let him back out of speaking, Steve decided to talk about using Ruby in a commercial project.

And that’s a good thing. Steve’s company is developing a fax device controller and Steve is using Ruby to write the PC-based scheduling and control software for outbound faxes. This is a native windows application that will actually ship with the product (the fax controller is not yet shipping).

It was refreshing to hear about a Ruby project that is product related.

Some random notes:

• Uses: Ruby, Vruby/Swin, win32ole, exerb
• Threads on windows are problematic and can suck 100% of the CPU. There was some discussion of how to solve this problem using separate ruby processes and allowing them to communicate within the box.
• Exerb will occasionally GP when built on certian machines. This problem has not reoccured since switching to Ruby 1.8.

As a wrap up, Steve shared some techniques for testing GUI code.

Generating Code in Ruby (Jack Herrington)

Jack is the author of Code Generation in Action. Jack talks about using code generation for anything from small one-liners to large MDA-style generators.

Some advice from Jack:

• First hand write the code that you will eventually generate.
• Generate only what you understand (avoid the wizard syndrome).
• Maintain the generator as part of the build process.

I only disagreed with Jack on one point. Jack seemed in favor of guarded blocks in generated code. Guarded blocks are areas where developers are not allowed to edit. I personally have a great dislike for guarded blocks and would rather have the generated code be in a completely separate file, but that’s just me.

I don’t have much details here, buts that’s probably because I was doing more listennig than note taking at that point in time.

Roundtable with Matz

Chad Fowler introduced Matz and opened the floor for questions. Matz set the ground rules in that he will talk about Rite and Ruby 2.0 tomorrow night. So no Ruby 2/Rite questions for tonight.

Note :

The following is very paraphrased and greatly shortened. I captured what I could from the talk as best I could. I apologize for any inaccuracies and errors.

• Question: When is Ruby getting static typing?
  • Matz: Ummmmm .… I’m actually thinking about optional typing in Ruby 2.0, but based on signature rather than classes.
  • Comment: Strong Duck Typing?
• Question: What is that status of a packaging system for Ruby? I know you are a benevolent dictator, but perhaps this is a where we need less benevolence and more dictator.
  • Matz: I maintain Ruby itself but do not implement
  • Comment: But perhaps you are the right person to choose an implementation or the person to work on it.
  • Matz: Perhaps we can setup a Wiki and gather requirements.
  • Moderator: Perhaps

    Aside: This packaging question turns out to be one of the more significant questions asked during the roundtable. It caused a handful of us to lose a great deal of sleep over the weekend. More on this later.

• Question: Can you explain the reasoning behind the proc and Proc.new argument semantics?
  • There is a lengthy discussion about the difference. In the end, Matz agrees to deprecate "proc" in favor of "lambda" in order to differentiate block vs method argument semantics.

    Aside: I’m not sure I’m happy with this. I tend to use proc much more often than lambda, but I guess I can adjust. I suppose this shows what can happen when you can bend Matz’s ear.

• Question: What is the news about the Ruby language specification?
  • Matz defered to Rich Kilmer who talked about the possibility of using a stand-alone parser to be the arbitor of syntax.
• Question: Is the C API considered part of Ruby?
  • Matz: No, new versions might not support the current API, but I hope to provide some kind of backward compatibility.
• Question: Is there someway we can get more of the Japanese web pages translated to english?
  • Matz: I don’t know.
  • Comment: I’ve had good luck with Babelfish.
  • Comment: I have the a copy of the Ruby Hackers guide. Its in Japanese. It’s a great book, I haven’t read it.
• Question: What are you doing as the author of Ruby to ensure that Ruby doesn’t change and break are existing code?
  • Matz: Ruby 2.0 will be different from Ruby 1.8 and there will be some incompatibilities between the two, but Ruby 1.8 will remain as it is. Ruby 1.9 will generate warnings for future incompatibilities.
  • Comment: There are some advantages to being small and having a smaller installed base in that we can evolve the language
• Question: What is being done to improve Ruby on the Win32 platform?
  • Matz: The Win32 folks are working on issues to make the platform better. Perhaps we need to get away from standard IO on that platform.
• Question: Is Ruby going to follow Perl 6’s lead in regular expressions?
  • Matz: I have no plan to follow Perl6 in regular expressions, however if someone can convince me of a need for a particular feature I might change my mind. Ruby 1.9 will have a new regular expression engine that will unencumber it from license problems and gives better performance.
• Question: Would it be possible to optimize string and regex interpolations when the interpolated data is static?
  • Matz: Ruby optimization is very difficult. I have considered many things and I have rejected many things. If you have some good ideas, I would like to consider them.
• Question: What is the status of the local / block variable issue?
  • Matz: In Ruby 2.0, all block variables will be local to the block.
• Question: Do you get bored working on Ruby for 10 years?
  • Matz: I’m not bored yet.
• Question: What was the motiviation for using "#" for both comments and string interpolation?
  • Matz: Ummm … I don’t remember.
• Question: People at work ask me why they should use Ruby instead of Perl. What should I tell them?
  • Matz: I’m not the right person to answer that because I am not a Perl programmer.
  • Comment: It’s like the Matix. No one can tell what Ruby is, you have to experience it.

At this point people started sharing Ruby stories in the workplace. Matz closed by saying that we will review changes for Ruby 2.0 tomorrow evening. Yeah!

Post Meeting Talks

The package question that came up during the roundtable touched a nerve with a number of us. Rich Kilmer, Chad Fowler, Paul Brannan and I (Jim Weirich) headed for the hotel (Club Max) and setup our laptops in a corner (near an outlet). Chad had a cellular internet connection so we were able to pull down a number of packages and previous attempts for review. We finally decided we would hijack the RubyGems project started by Ryan Leavengood. Ryan presented RubyGems at the very first Ruby conference in 2001 and got a favorable reception. Unfortunately the work was never continued and the project languished. So, Ryan, if you are out there, we hope you don’t mind.

We setup the following rough goals:

• Single File, System Independent Distribution Format
• Simple installation
• Explicit versioning, possibly multiple version installed at the same time.
• Easy downloading, something like apt-get.

I don’t recall enumerating the goals in this form, but they evolved from the discussions as the night progressed. In particular, we waffled on installing gems or loading files directly from gems. We finally decided on going through an installation because shared native libraries couldn’t be loaded directly from a gem file.

That first night, Rich and Paul attacked the package format and metadata required for a gem. Chad and I started looking at compression libraries and packaging techniques. Zlib is now packaged with Ruby 1.8, so it will be easy to compress the individual files. Standard zip files were considered, especially when we found a zip file library in the RAA. But eventually we decided on a self-extracting format that begins with a Ruby script to do the extraction.

By the end of the evening my mind was turning to mush. Fortunately the bar began turning out lights at 2:00 am. I headed off to bed, but I’m pretty sure Rich kept going for a bit beyond that.

Next: One day down, Two to go …