This week there are 3 pieces of candy which are all sort of related, they are all talking about ruby
Candy nr 1: Faster ruby
Ruby for windows has long been available as a 1 click installer, this one click installer is based on Visual C++ version 6 which came out in 1998.
There is an effort going on to update this installer to a newer version of Mingw + GCC.
The new installer is called Rubyinstaller and can be found here.
How much faster is it?
Benchmarks can be found here.
Candy nr 2: Iron ruby
IronRuby has been around for quite some time, it’s now up to it’s 0.9 release.
Which would seem to be getting closer to the 1.0 mark. It has reached most of it’s compatibility goals and it’s main focus now seems to be performance.
For those of you wondering what IronRuby is:
IronRuby is a .Net implementation of Ruby based on the DLR, the dynamic brother of the CLR on which most of the regular .Net languages are based.
IronRuby is both available on windows and on Mono.
More information can be found on it’s about page.
Candy nr 3: Browser ruby
Last piece of candy is Gestalt. Gestalt is a way of using Ruby / Python / XAML in the browser by leveraging the Silverlight plugin.
This means that it will work on any browser which has the Silverlight plugin installed.
It can be called by placing a reference to the gestalt.js file which can be downloaded from the downloads page.
This means that DOM manipulation, animation etc is possible by using Ruby or Python.
Conclusion
I Hope you enjoyed these pieces of Ruby candy hopefully I will be back again soon with more candy.
A while back a colleague of mine used to send out emails every once in a while called candy of the week.
This little piece of candy usually was a pretty picture or website which lightened up everyone's day.
I was thinking about moving this concept to my blog and to go with a developer theme. To make things interesting for my Developer readers.
Which I’m going to assume most of you are.
My first post will be some double candy:
Candy nr 1:
ExtJS is a JavaScript library and UI framework to make setting up AJAX forms with validation and a whole lot more a breeze compared to the other offerings out there. There is a wide array of samples and demo’s available on the website so you can see how little effort is actually required to make forms and other UI components work together.
This framework + JavaScript library has just released version 3.0, which adds charting support, data binding support and Ext Direct a remoting / data streaming effort.
A slight warning should be placed here, ExtJS is a dual licensed project:
GPL + payed except for Ext Core which is licensed under and MIT license.
Candy nr 2:
The Coolite Toolkit is a set of AJAX enabled .Net Controls which use ExtJS to perform it’s magic. As can be seen from the examples these controls make it very easy to integrate ASP.NET with ExtJS in a way that is very clean and takes away most of the JavaScript and puts it into nicely wrapped controls.