Some Ruby Before Christmas

'Twas the Saturday before Christmas and throughout Ruby-land
hackers were working, refact'ring by hand.
Their programs were written with the greatest of care
in hopes that a new VM soon would be there.
The newsgroup was still, the irc channels too
In light of the quiet, what's a blogger to do?
When up on the mail list, there arose such a clatter
I sprang to my laptop to see what was the matter.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear
but a great bunch of news before the New Year.

Well, Clement Clark Moore I'm not, but this has been a great couple of weeks for Ruby, and those of us who enjoy it:

• rubinius (the smalltalk inspired VM written by Evan Phoenix and a host of others) is moving fast and is drawing a lot of interest from Ruby-fans everywhere.
• Not to be outdone, Jruby (Ruby on the JVM from Charles Nutter, Thomas Enobo, and a large and active group of contributors) has just released version 0.9.2
• Mongrel (the super fast, super secure Ruby webserver) is sitting on the cusp of a 1.0 release thanks to the work of Zed Shaw and his cohorts.
• RubyInside published a Ruby Advent Calendar
• Ruby 1.8.5 p2 was released in response to a security vulnerability.
• Ruby development has moved from the old cvs base to a new SVN repository
• Jeremy McAnally has announced that he's releasing his Humble Little Ruby Book for free as a Christmas gift to the Ruby community.

I hope you're looking forward to a great 2007, full of Ruby goodness. Have a happy holiday season.

Update: I nearly forgot Jeremy McAnally's announcement (the last item on the list).