Aimred Developer Blog August 2007 Archive
Project Spotlight: Sequel
Sequel is a great library providing a nice clean interface to a variety of databases. In a previous project we used it to generate reports using PDF::Writer (which is looking for a new maintainer) sucking in data from a large MS SQLServer database with no problems. Sequel is under some very active development and features are being added thick and fast. If ActiveRecord is just too heavy to use it’s a real viable alternative for easy database access.
New On Our Bookshelf
- RESTful Web Services – Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby
- Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World – Joe Armstrong
Ruby Is Not Just For Rails
While Rails is a great framework, Ruby itself is an even better language and one that is suited for a host of other tasks beside web applications. We’ve been playing around with Ruby/Gnome2 and Glade and after a short learning curve (mainly hunting down which GTK signals are fired and when) we were happily dragging and dropping buttons and wiring the GUI up to a Ruby app. With the release of GtkBuilder in GTK 2.12 libglade is going to be made obsolete although there is no support for GtkBuilder in Ruby/Gnome2 yet.