Ruby

From Admin-SIG

Ruby is a newer, popular interpreted language supported on many platforms. It is respected for its powerful object oriented design.

Ruby is an interpreted scripting language which is truely Object Oriented. It has many of the text-processing capabilities of perl, making it a good choice for straightforward system administration tasks. However, its superior Object Oriented basis makes it a good choice for larger programming tasks.

Much of the buzz about Ruby is about using Ruby on Rails to build web applications. Introduction to Ruby on Rails (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/10/13/what_is_rails.html?page=1|)

Matthew Bohnsack (http://bohnsack.com/) will give a talk on Ruby at the November 9, 2005 NMOSUG meeting.

Slides for this presentation (http://bohnsack.com/2005/10/17/nmosug-talk-on-ruby/)

Newbie Impressions

The thing I find most interesting about Ruby is the wealth of data representations possible since everything in Ruby is an object. There are very rich methods for organizing data, such as extracting arrays of one class by extracting a single member out of an array of larger classes. The possibilities of having alterations to a class be applied to existing instances of that class also has great possibilities. It has a very nice interactive shell for development. I hope to look into debugging capabilities soon.

As a non-WWW developer, I was impressed by Rails, but it's not my area of interest. The Ruby interactive shell has great potential as a mathematical manipulation and display (plotting) package, to compete with Octave (or the commercial MatLab or IDL). It will not be efficient, so it will only be for relatively simple plotting and math tasks. I would also like to know about (and get links here) for information on calling C, ActiveX, or GUI toolkits from Ruby.