So I've been playing around with Ruby over the past few days, and as usual when I play with Ruby I continue to be amazed at how cool it is. Now I just need to come up with a real project to use it in...
A few of the neater things I've been playing aroun with:
- Rails - A web application framework for Ruby. Actually it's made up of several subprojects, only one of which (ActiveRecord, the Object-Relational mapping package) is available at the moment, but still, it's quite impressive. When the rest of it is ready for prime time I'm going to have to throw together some toy web apps to get a better feel for it.
- RubyGems - A packaging framework for Ruby code. While it does fall into the totally lame trap of including the name of the language in it's name it still manages to be quite cool. I hope more Ruby projects start using it in the future.
- Rake - A 'make' like build tool written in Ruby. Actually, the 'rakefile' you write for your project turns out to be a complete Ruby program, so you have all the power of the language right there for you to access. Plus, with Ruby's nice readable syntax the whole thing turns out to be much easier to understand than a Makefile. How cool is that!
- Ruby 1.8.1's standard library has all sorts of neat stuff in it. Full YAML support, a unit testing framework, a framework for building custom little http servers, XML parsing, the list goes on and on...
Anyway, I'm still in the 'playing around' stage, but all in all I continue to be more and more impressed with this stuff...
