In this RubyFringe talk, Reginald Braithwaite shows how to write Ruby that reads, writes, and rewrites Ruby. The demos include extending the Ruby language with conditional expressions, new forms of evaluation such as call-by-name and call-by-need, and more.
Ruby 1.9.2 Preview 1 is now available and brings API improvements such as Method#parameters, GC optimization for long lived objects, and more. Also: to keep up to speed with Ruby implementations, David A. Black announced ruby-versions.net which provides a long list of MRI versions as well as JRuby, Rubinius and REE installations.
The current Ruby 1.9.1 doesn't have the required features to allow ParseTree's runtime features to work - which means some libraries that depend on those features won't work. Examples are Merb's action arguments or heckle. We take a look at the state of ParseTree - and how ruby_parser is a possible way out.
RFactor is a Ruby refactoring tool that aims to bring automated refactoring support to text editors. We talked to its developer Fabio Kung to learn how it works and what's planned for the future.
Sequel, apart from being an alternative to ActiveRecord, offers a complete Ruby toolkit to handle database operations. InfoQ had the chance to catch up with Jeremy Evans who replaced Sharon Rosner as project leader eight months ago.
Merb 1.0 has been released. Some last minute changes included improved JRuby and Windows support (action arguments support under JRuby). Also: EngineYard announced support for Merb.
Ruby_parser, ParseTree, and it's cleaned up output UnifiedRuby, provide access to Ruby source code ASTs. We take a look at four static analysis tools built in plain Ruby: Flay, Roodi, Rufus, Reek.
Ryan Davis announced the release of ParseTree 3.0, as well as an update to related libraries: Ruby2Ruby and Flog. Sexp_processor, the library to write visitors for analyzing parse tree s-exprs was split out as a gem. Also: ruby_parser 2.0, a Ruby parser written in Ruby, was released with many improvements.
MacRuby 0.3 was released with many improvements, among them support for GUIs built with the InterfaceBuilder. Also: HotCocoa, a Builder-style API for Cocoa GUIs is shipped with the new release of MacRuby.
Whether it's LISP macros or LINQ's expression trees - access to the AST of code is a powerful tool. We look at how ParseTree allows this in Ruby - and how it's being used in libraries like Ambition, Sequel and the web framework Merb.
Parsing Ruby source code has been done in C, Java, C# - and now in Ruby. Ryan Davis, now working at EngineYard on the Rubinius project, just released ruby_parser 1.0.
