Quick Ruby Hits

Not too long ago I wrote that I would be covering a number of big Ruby happenings, then I let the summer run away with me. Let me run down a quick list of things, and then try to come back and cover them in August.

• Rubinius, the smalltalk-esque Ruby implemented in ruby, has cut their first release (0.7) in July. This is nowhere near production ready yet, but it sure is looking cool.
• The JRuby team is also doing some good looking work. They’re focusing on optimizations right now, and have some spiffy looking JIT work in their tree.
• In a inter-implementation team project, the Google Summer of Code projects to work on RSpec based test suites for Ruby implementations is also picking up steam. Even the IronRuby team has been in contact to talk to the test writers.
• There are just two weeks left before the Ruby Hoedown in Raleigh, NC. If you’re a southern Ruby hacker, this is the place you need to be. Registration is just $100, which covers both days of the conference (the 10th and 11th of August). They’re kicking things off with a Ruby and Rails charity workshop from 8AM until noon on August 10th led by Marcel Molina, Jr., Bruce Tate, and Chad Fowler. In addition to all the normal Ruby goodness, they’ll be covering rcov, RSpec, FlexMock, and Selenium. After that it should be a day and a half of great Ruby talks and presentations.
• RubyCentral has announced their RubyConf 2007 call for papers, so it looks like it’s time to start watching for registration to open up … since they’re keeping the number of seats low, this one should sell out as fast or faster than last year.
• One last bit on the conference front, a regional conference in the Philadelphia area has also been announced for September 27-28.