1. Ruby

I gave a little talk on Ruby at today's VALE-NJ Technology Awareness Group meeting, and so I'm using my slides to finally kick off this vaporseries.

[Slides are embedded as Flash here if you're reading in an aggregator.]

It seemed to be taken pretty well, though it could easily have been dismissed as the fanboyish ravings of a neophyte Rubyist. The folks from Rutgers were interested in having me come talk to their software architecture group, so it couldn't have gone too badly, I suppose.

I need to stop cramming so much into presentations. Rambling about reflection and OO at a speed the Micro-Machines Guy would envy isn't the best way to share enthusiasm about Ruby.

The rest of the meeting was interesting: Ron Jantz, the Digital Library Architect at Rutgers, posed a number of challenging questions about trust, authenticity, and reliability in the digital realm; Terry Catapano, Special Collections Analyst at Columbia, exposed the lack of data model inherent in many current metadata schemas and suggested ontologies as a potential direction; and Jeffery Triggs, Applications Programmer at Rutgers, demonstrated the Java DjVu Viewer Applet for displaying DjVu-based images outside the DjVu browser plug-in. Many good questions were asked, and new faces were in the crowd, so the future of TAG seems to be bright.

I'm hoping to follow up my Ruby talk with another on Rails. That was my initial goal for today, but there was far too much to cover, knowing the audience was relatively new to both technologies.

It would be an understatement to say I've been enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails for a while now. Okay, I am downright fanatic — just look at that shrine to DHH in my closet; it's plain to see that I've drunk the (ruby red) Kool-Aid.

This is the first post in a series in which I hope to share my enthusiasm and explain just what it is that I love about Ruby on Rails. Not many folks in the library world seem to be using RoR — with a few notable exceptions — and so I thought it might be of interest to folks unfamiliar with or curious about Ruby and Rails to hear some impressions from a bright-eyed newbie.

Stay tuned, folks.

Forget about that Instant Rails stuff. Try the following tutorial instead, which gave me a better sense of how Rails actually works. Very, very helpful.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html

Ruby on Rails is quite cool. What I don't like about it, so far:

1. I don't know Ruby, so I can't do anything sophisticated with Rails
2. I'm not sure how much I like the idea of all Rails applications being so intimately tied to the Rails framework.

I've been hearing a lot about the Ruby programming language lately, and specifically about Ruby on Rails. After looking at different strategies to get this sucker up and running, I decided to take the path of the cowardly and install Instant Rails. I am still trying to figure out what the heck it is and does, but a lot of people seem to like it for throwing together quick, powerful, open, and structured web applications.

On a related "gaining in popularity" note is S5, an open-source, open-standards application for producing web-enabled presentations. No more must one be a slave to that wicked master, Microsoft Powerpoint (or OO.o Impress, for that matter, or whatever you crazy Mac heathens use). Now one can produce a web presentation using S5, which puts all the material into one XHTML file. It uses CSS and JavaScript for styles and functionality, respectively. I think I might check that out as well. Counterpoint: OpenOffice 2.0's Impress application does a bang-up job as well.

And finally, what is all this talk of the Web 2.0? Here's a more or less full run-down of Web 2.0, and five reasons why it matters.

In the meantime, I'm still cranking away on my NLB'd terminal servers.

(And another trackback test).