'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 [1] (the smalltalk inspired VM written by Evan Phoenix [2] and a host of others) is moving fast and is drawing a lot of interest from Ruby-fans everywhere.
• Not to be outdone, Jruby [3] (Ruby on the JVM from Charles Nutter [4], Thomas Enobo [5], and a large and active group of contributors) has just released version 0.9.2 [6]
• Mongrel [7] (the super fast, super secure Ruby webserver) is sitting on the cusp of a 1.0 release thanks to the work of Zed Shaw [8] and his cohorts.
• RubyInside [9] published a Ruby Advent Calendar [10]
• Ruby 1.8.5 p2 [11] was released in response to a security vulnerability.
• Ruby development has moved [12] from the old cvs base to a new SVN repository [13]
• Jeremy McAnally [14] has announced that he's releasing his Humble Little Ruby Book [15] 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).

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-pate
http://on-ruby.blogspot.com