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  • How to Develop New Activities for the One Laptop Per Child Project?

    The One Laptop Per Child project has starting shipping its first generation of XO laptops. OLPC "is not a laptop project, it is an education project", explains Nicholas Negroponte, director of the project. A full Sugar based development environment is available for developers to contribute new activities to the project. Sugar supports collaborative activities when XOs are meshed together.

  • Inside the full speed Rubinius debugger

    Debugging Ruby code just got much faster - at least with Rubinius. Unlike the debuggers for MRI or JRuby, the Rubinius full speed debugger allows programs to run at normal speed while they're debugged. We take a look at how the Rubinius VM's transparent design made this possible.

  • Duck Typing and Protocols vs. Inheritance

    A recent debate on the RubyTalk list asked where to use is_a? vs respond_to? This highlights situations where objects respond to the same interface, but don't share any superclasses. We look at this debate and solutions in other languages such as Smalltalk, Erlang, and Scala.

  • Interview: Zed Shaw on Mongrel and Ruby in the Enterprise

    Zed Shaw - creator of Mongrel and the Profligacy GUI library - sat down with InfoQ for a video interview. Among the topics discussed are Mongrel, how to make money with Ruby in the enterprise and his interest in alternative languages such as Lua, Smalltalk and Factor.

  • Debuggers considered Harmful?

    A blog post titled "Debugger Support Considered Harmful" claims that Ruby debugging support is lacking - and that that's a good thing. We look at the various rebuttals and the state of Ruby debuggers.

  • Ruby Hoedown Presentations available online

    Videos of the sessions from the Ruby Hoedown conference are now available online. Topics such as Merb, Ruby tuning, VoIP with Ruby are covered, as well as Smalltalk and Ruby history and much more.

  • Gemstone OODB to support JRuby, Rubinius

    Gemstone is working on Ruby support for their Object Database products, starting off with JRuby. We talked to Alan McKean from Gemstone about what's to come, technical details and Gemstone's plans with Rubinius.

  • Rubinius Internals: Threading, ObjectSpace, Debugging

    We continue the interview with Rubinius creator Evan Phoenix and talk about internals of how the VM uses bytecode manipulation for fast debugging, problems of implementing ObjectSpace and Threading.

  • Evan Phoenix on Rubinius - VM Internals Interview

    Rubinius is a Ruby implementation with a twist: it's written (mostly) in Ruby, building on concepts from Smalltalk VMs. We talked to Rubinius project lead Evan Phoenix about the state of the project and VM internals.

  • Evan Phoenix hired to work on Rubinius

    Evan Phoenix, who created Rubinius, a Ruby VM written in Ruby, has been hired by EngineYard. He'll work on Rubinius half time. This means that all Ruby implementations (Ruby, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius) now have paid developers working on them.

  • DHH Responds to Stateful Web Applications Row

    A comprehensive description of the current debate over the place of stateful web applications, as provoked by Avi Bryant, creator of the successful Seaside framework for Smalltalk. DHH is interviewed for his views on the matter.

  • Ruby Userspace Threads vs GUI toolkits Roundup

    Are Ruby 1.x User-space threads a hindrance with writing GUIs? We take a brief look at the situation and show the situation, options and alternatives such as using JRuby.

  • Implementing Seaside concepts in Rails on Rails?

    Why is Ruby on Rails one of the most popular web frameworks? Does Ruby on Rails introduce many new and revolutionary concepts? Or does it simply offer better implementations of old, common and well-known design practices? Does a "Rails on Seaside" concept make sense? Will Rails suffer from the effects of Bram's Law?

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