Wayne Kelly, leader of the open source Ruby.Net development project, announced last week that he intends to discontinue development of Ruby.Net and join up with Microsoft's IronRuby open source efforts. This might sound good on the surface, but it is a bad idea.

"The call came down from on high just before the Ruby 1.9 release: replace the standard csv.rb library with faster_csv.rb. With only hours to make the change it was a little harder than I expected. The FasterCSV code base was pretty vanilla Ruby, but it required more work than I would have guessed to get running on Ruby 1.9. Let me share a few of the tips I learned while doctoring the code in the hope that it will help others get their code ready for Ruby 1.9..."

With the recent rise in popularity of the Ruby programming language (largely driven by the excellent but not perfect web framework called Rails), I’ve noticed a little fear in the air … fear on the part of some people in the PHP community.

Microsoft has cracked open .NET a little further and surrendered some control over its development platform to the open-source community. Latest code for company's take on Python and Ruby – fine-tuned for .NET, IronPython, and IronRuby – has been quietly released under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) license.

"Ruby experts tell us why they are in love with Ruby/Rails. Recently, I attended a Ruby users group in Atlanta and I was very surprised to see over 50 people attending the usergroup on a weekday evening, and nearly all of them have been active members of the usergroup for at least over a year. I could tell that they loved Ruby/Rails unlike anything I have seen in the the C++/Java community (languages I work with). The expert panel below will tell us why they are "in love" with Ruby/Rails..."

Ruby on Rails is garnering a lot of praise as an easy-to-use, database-driven Web framework for developing Web applications. Most of the documentation for Ruby on Rails centers on Macintosh, with the remainder seemingly only for Windows machines, but RoR is perfectly usable on Linux computers too. This article explains how to install and begin developing with RoR in Linux.

"Ruby on Rails is quickly becoming one of the most popular modern programming language framework combinations. Specifically, Ruby is a programming language that has been around for a few years and Rails is a framework for Ruby that is a bit newer and is just about the hottest thing in application and web development right now.

Urbis.com, written completely in Ruby using the open source framework Ruby on Rails, is yet another social networking site, but with a twist: it was created by a writer, for writers.

"Ruby 1.9: What To Expect is an online slideshow by Sam Ruby that covers a lot of the differences between the Ruby 1.8 that we all know and love and the currently experimental Ruby 1.9. Sam's examples are to the point, easily digestible, and span 47 slides..."