RubyForge Open For Ruby Project Hosting

tcopeland writes "RubyForge is a new hosting area for open source Ruby projects. It's powered by the popular GForge fork of SourceForge development. There's even a couple of code snippets up there already."

Comments

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[GuidoJ]

Or maybe, after reading the linked to websites everybody is now creating their own Ruby projects and are frantically hacking away at the keyboard ...

Seriously though, here are a few observations:
* the extensive feature list is quite impressive
* the language has been around for more than 10 years now
* there have been linux packages for as long as I can remember

OTOH:
* I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby
* the latest news item on RubyForge is about a program for sorting (sorry, but it did not impress me very much)

Oh well, it's probably big in Japan.

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[sporty]

Ruby is bigger in the land of the rising sun. You'd be amazed at usage "out there".

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[gavri]

Apparently, they're "too nice".
As has been posted on the newsgroup (comp.lang.ruby) before, they're too "enlightened" to get into flamewars defending ruby.
Flamewars, as we all know is the best forum for advocacy :-)

eat your own cooking

[larry bagina]

Anyone else find it ironic that GForge (and RubyForge) are written in php?

Re:eat your own cooking

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the GForge code already existed and works pretty well, so why reinvent the wheel? Someone could have rewritten all of GForge in Ruby, I suppose, but why bother. In this case laziness wins out over hubris.

Re:eat your own cooking

[ichimunki]

Nope. I think it is very sensible when an existing application exists for a given purpose (like hosting collaborative software development projects) to use that software. If RubyForge were going to be written in Ruby, it would be quite some time before the site were "featureful" enough and stable enough to host other projects. Using existing software means that 1) other projects can get hosted today, 2) perhaps the Ruby version of *Forge can be hosted and developed on the non-Ruby version of *Forge.

Re:eat your own cooking

[tcopeland]

> other projects can get hosted today

Exactly.

> perhaps the Ruby version of *Forge can be
> hosted and developed on the non-Ruby version
> of *Forge

Sure, no reason why not if someone's interested in doing that. In the meantime, though, we'll continue to keep enhancing and improving GForge via suggestions collected on RubyForge and other GForge installations.

Re:eat your own cooking

[Arandir]

Ruby is not a scripting language in the sense that Perl is. Thus it is not necessarily suitable for creating web sites. It can be of course, just as you can create a site in C++, but the web site manipulation is not where it's strength lies.

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[Colonel Panic]

Mostly it's just that we Rubyists are having so much fun writing Ruby code that we didin't notice this 'back page' /. posting...

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[Colonel Panic]

I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby

Check out the RealWorldRuby wiki page for a list of real world applications of Ruby. It's in use at NASA, Intel, HP and Agilent among others.

the latest news item on RubyForge is about a program for sorting (sorry, but it did not impress me very much)

You have to remember that RubyForge has only been up for about a week.
A couple of applications that are coming soon:
* A genetic algorithms package
* A swarm particle optimization package

Tired of waiting for Perl6?

[Colonel Panic]

It looks like the Perl6 folks are borrowing a lot of ideas from Ruby.

Looks like Perl6 will be great when it comes out in 2007 or so, but if you really don't care to wait that long give Ruby a try.

this is good to see

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Ruby is awesome... unfortunately it has two "flaws":

1) Not "different enough" from Perl.. at least at first glance. But if you've ever done heavy rapid OO development in Perl, you'll appreciate how much more elegant Ruby is.

2) Not enough 3rd part modules, no easy equivalent of CPAN. I can write all kinds of cool stuff in Perl because of the awesome selection of modules.

I love Perl, it's one of my favorite languages (next to The One True Language C), but my co-workers can no longer understand my Perl code (and frankly, neither can I sometimes). I'd love to use good object-oriented design under a perl-like language... like Ruby!

(Yes I've used Python, the object model and scoping rules didn't quite jive with me, and I use regexps all the time so I like those to be first-class language constructs. The whitespace thing is probably the only really cool thing about python, imho. That, and it's Not Perl which is important to a lot of folks :-)

So if you're a perl hacker and you'd like a breath of fresh air (before the TORNADO of perl6 comes by, anyway), give Ruby a try. Use it for your small scripts, you know, the ones you write in about 100 seconds in Perl to accomplish some simple task... try 'em in Ruby...

Re:this is good to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting more modules/apps! well I guess that's the idea of Rubyforge so its pretty good to see it created. OTOH it's NEW so don't expect a few thousands projects in a few days, though considering how fast you can develop in Ruby that might happen ;-).

Really if you haven't tried Ruby give it a chance(or give yourself a chance,yes is that good) its a real joy to use. Regarding the not "different enough from perl" I don't really know what's that about!! ruby isn't perl, I can read and understand what I did months ago at first glance and the language itself leads you to a structured/readable code not spaggeti(I'm not saying perl code looks like it ok!!)

Re:this is good to see

[Anonymous Coward]

>Not "different enough" from Perl.. at least at first glance.

Sorry, but if this was your first glance I must wonder where your eyes where at that time ;-)

Ruby has a lot of features which remind me to Smalltalk which is very different from Perl!

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[LWATCDR]

From reading the apps I have to see I do not see a killer app for Ruby. From what I hear Ruby is a very good language but is is better enough to replace perl? What about python. The more support libs/moduals that a programing langauge has easier it is to get real work done with it. I am not fond of Perl but I love CSPAN. I can find tools for just about any task in perl.
Ruby is cool keep working on it :)

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[tcopeland]

> yet only one single, trollish comment so far.

Yup, that's probably because the story only appeared on the "developer" sidebar. So it didn't get the usual attention that main page storied get. And to think I had MaxClients set to 40 in anticipation of a true Slashdotting! Oh well.

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[tcopeland]

Lots of little utilities and glue usages out there too. Like this site - an hourly build system using Java and Ant, driven by Ruby. Fun stuff!

Re:Warforge

[tcopeland]

Nah, it's an instance of GForge, which is a fork of SourceForge. Lots of forging going on. Hammers and such-like.

Re: Ruby? Hmm.

[gidds]

is is better enough to replace perl? What about python.

It would only need to be good enough to coexist. Is it worth learning instead of either of those? For example, I know a little Perl (and don't want to know much more), and no Python; should I look at Ruby instead? How do they compare?

Re: Ruby? Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby compares more to python than Perl. Perl and ruby really don't belong to be compared to each other. Python I have had some experience with, but it didn't impress me as much as Ruby did. The whitespacing along with some limitations that either I didn't understand or were not easily available in python led me to ruby.

Language wise, Ruby seems to me to be more correct than most other intrepreted languages I have used. The use of mixins to include the same basic functionality across classes was a godesend for a v4l2 application that I worked on.

It is as easy to implement C and C++ libraries in Ruby as it is in TCL. Tcl is very easy, Perl sucks (XS was too much for me when I knew something better existed), and python I have no experience in.

One of the more impressive projects in rubyland is the drb, distributed ruby project. A module that is built in a few hundred lines of code can be included in a few lines of code to create a truely distributed ruby application. This is more than simple message passing or SOAP.

Another place to go to is pinkjuice.com for some more info..

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[Hawkins]

Being the person who wrote that news item and is developing rSort, I feel I should say that I agree with you. It's not very impressive, and frankly I was not expecting Tom to put that particular item on the home page, but there's little I can do to control that. I will say that there are far more impressive projects going on both at RubyForge and at raa.ruby-lang.org, and I'd encourage anyone with a mild interest in ruby to browse through both sites and see what others have done with it.

_dave

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[Colonel Panic]

I am not fond of Perl but I love CSPAN

Yeah, I agree; now that I know Ruby I'd rather watch CSPAN than program in Perl.

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[xteddy]

Yeah, it's good to have an alternative to FOX news...

Re: Ruby? Hmm.

[LWATCDR]

Ruby and Perl compare well to each other in the type of tasks you choose to do with both. They are scripting language. Not what you would want to write most apps in. I found TCL to be hard and Perl to be easy. It might just be I found better docs for Perl than I could for TCL. Like I said Ruby sounds good but there always seems to be limited "room" for programing languages. Look at Forth, Comal, Prolog, APL, Pilot, ,Logo ,and PL/1. They have all faded from popular use. I rember peoplet telling me that Logo was going to reach childern how to program. Most of the kids from the 80s that went on to program learned Basic not Logo. I heard Forth was the next big thing. It was as fast as Asm but it was portable. I found it to harder than Asm. Comal I loved, it was so much better than Basic. Right now Perl and PHP seem to be very hot languages. Python has potental to move up into a staring role. Python+wxWindows could be huge. It could be a replacement for Visual Basic. Ruby may end up being a curiosity language. It is a shame but often the best does not win.

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[tcopeland]

Yeah, so far I've been promoting news items to the front page based on a project either

1) doing a new release

or

2) importing code into the project for the first time.

Not sure how we'll do front page news promotion in the future....

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[Hawkins]

Maybe include a checkbox for "Consider this news item the front page"? Would cut down on number of items you'd have to slog through, as well as give developers a little more leeway in what they put in their news items.

_dave

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[tcopeland]

Good idea, I've entered a feature request on the GForge core project here.

Thanks,

Tom

why?

[Suppafly]

Why does the rubyforge site have an apple ripoff look about it. Is a lot of ruby work done in macos?

Re:why?

[tcopeland]

The OSX theme comes with GForge. RubyForge could just as easily look like this or this. Just a configuration option...

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[Arandir]

I never encountered an actual application written in Ruby

And I've never seen an actual application written in Perl or Python. By "actual application" I mean something that a non-programmer end user would download for a specific task not related to the maintenance of the computer.

Re:Ruby ? Hmm.

[patch-rustem]

Ruby's no outcast.
You insult my baby.
She has so many friends.
Ha!

Last Post!

[patch-rustem]

last post!
Baby Ruby says "bwarghhhhh!"