Weblog of Fernando Reig Matthies

Ruby is now in the top ten languages in the TIOBE index, and has been declared Programming Language of the Year for 2006 because it had the largest popularity increase in 2006 of all the languages tracked:

We are glad to announce that Ruby has become “Programming Language of the Year 2006″.

Ruby has the highest popularity increase in a year of all programming languages (+2.15%). Runner up this year is JavaScript with +1.31%. Both languages are boosted by their corresponding frameworks, Ruby On Rails and Ajax. This might be a new trend. In the recent past it was necessary to have a large company behind the language to get it in the spotlight (Sun with Java, Microsoft with C#), but nowadays a killer app appears to be sufficient. Viral marketing via the Internet works!

The winners of the last 2 years, PHP and Java, are the losers of this year. Other trends that are observed are the growth of dynamically typed languages and the fact that the difference in popularity between languages is getting less.

Via O’Reilly Network

As David puts it, after almost eight months Rails 1.2 RC1 is out

We have been reading and playing for some time with the new features such us “REST and Resources” as well as “Formats and respond_to”. Since Ruby won’t be multibyte-aware until this time next year, what was really new to me is “Multibyte”:

Imagine the string ‘€2.99’. If we manipulate it at a byte-level, it’s easy to get broken dreams:

‘€2.99’[0,1] # => ”\342”
‘€2.99’[0,2] # => ”?”
‘€2.99’[0,3] # => “€”

The € character takes three bytes. So not only can’t you easily byte-manipulate it, but String#first and TextHelper#truncate used to choke too. In the old days, this would happen:

‘€2.99’.first # => ’\342’
truncate(‘€2.99’, 2) # => ’?’

With Rails 1.2, you of course get:

‘€2.99’.first # => ‘€’
truncate(‘€2.99’, 2) # => ‘€2’

The other day for some reason my Firefox 2.0 browser crashed and on reopening it asked me if I wanted to restore the tabs and windows of the last session.

Really a nice feature I would like to have not only when the browser crashes but also if I have to quit Firefox for restarting the machine or whatever reason there is to quit the app.

Via David Reeves I got a clue that you can configure Firefox 2.0 as follows to open your last session tabs and windows “automagically” upon starting the browser.

As soon as I found it out and tried it, I thought this is a great feature, that I am missing now in Safari and Flock browsers, who will hopefully someday follow Mozilla’s steps.

Adobe announces Rails SDK for Flex:

Adobe’s Mike Potter brings the cherry news that an officially-backed Rails SDK for Flex and the rest of the company’s RIA suite is now available.

Derek Wischusen from Flex on Rails gives us the scoop on its content:

Currently, the SDK contains a sample demonstrating: (1) Intergrating with a database, basic CRUD, and rails migrations. (2) Uploading and downloading files. (3) Downloading data directly from Flex and sending data to a new browser window directly from Flex. (4) a simple Directory Explorer. The last sample uses WebORB for integrating Flex with Rails.

Great news. Flash is on the fast track out its ghetto image and its exciting to see Adobe care about integration with the world around it.

Via Riding Rails

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