In this issue…

• 2010 Goals: Data Discussion - Today!
• Camino 2.0 alpha 1 now available
• Thoughts on Mozilla’s 2010 mobile goals
• Firefox Themes: Alex Faaborg on Firefox toolbar UI
• Six new localizations in Firefox 3.0.4
• Ubiquity Update
• Window Snyder on Mozilla security metrics
• Developer calendar
• Subscribe to the email newsletter

2010 Goals: Data Discussion - Today!

As part of the ongoing discussion about Mozilla’s proposed 2010 goals, Mitchell Baker will be hosting a public discussion about the privacy and data goals today, Tuesday October 28, at 1 p.m. Pacific Time. This discussion will be broadcast on Air Mozilla, and we’ll use the #2010goals IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org for asking questions. For more information, please see Mitchell’s blog post.

Camino 2.0 alpha 1 now available

Samuel Sidler writes, “After months of hard work following the release of Camino 1.6, the Camino Project is proud to announce the first preview release of Camino 2. Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 contains several notable improvements, including tab overview, full content zoom, better support for Full Keyboard Access in the browser window, and a ‘Recently Closed Pages’ menu. Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 also has all of the improvements in version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, leading to better performance with popular plug-ins and enhanced support for web standards. For more information and to download, please visit our preview site.”

Thoughts on Mozilla’s 2010 mobile goals

Jay Sullivan has written an extensive blog post exploring his thinking about the possible 2010 goals Mozilla should have for its mobile work. “[T]he Web enables innovation and choice like no other platform, and for us to continue to act on our mission, we need to bring the capability for Web developers to build great software to mobile devices. To do this in a way that’s relevant, we need to address the needs of application developers and make the Web the best mobile platform that we can. A comparison with native capabilities is a good way to measure how we’re doing along that path. I hope that envisioning the Web as a mobile platform with this level of richness coming out of 2010 helps to drive a set of goals that we can rally around, and that we can make measureable in some way.” To read the full post and join in the discussion, head over to Jay’s weblog.

Firefox Themes: Alex Faaborg on Firefox toolbar UI

Alex writes, “When we were receiving feedback during the development of the Windows themes for Firefox 3, one question tended to come up a lot: Why are there three distinct visual styles of controls in the main toolbar?” Alex’s blog post explores the reasoning behind the Firefox 3 toolbar’s visual hierarchy, discussing why controls that are differently weighted are more useful and effective than equally weighted controls. It’s a fascinating post that delves into the depths behind some of the UI team’s decisions about Firefox 3 and the thoughts and theories that underlie the designs that were chosen. Read Alex’s full post at his weblog.

Six new localizations in Firefox 3.0.4

Seth Bindernagel writes that six new languages have been added to Firefox with the release of Firefox 3.0.4. The new languages are: Bulgarian, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian, Occitan, and Welsh. “Congratulations to Ogi (bg), Eduardo (eo), Sander (et), Raivis (lv), Yannig (oc), and Dewi and David (cy) for all your hard work! Special thanks to Pike for driving the technical aspects of this release, Stas who managed the web services of this release, and Pascal on webparts. Finally, Gandalf stepped in sometime around 5 AM the day before the release to write a few patches and check in the code. It was a real team process.” For more information, see Seth’s blog post.

Ubiquity Update

Aza Raskin has announced the release of Ubiquity 0.1.2. “We’ve got an amazing amount of feedback about Ubiquity since its launch. One of the main points has been wanting features and bug fixes for the commands included in Ubiquity, as well as more commands. The largest update in [this release] is the ability for all of the built-in commands to be streamed in from the HTTPS-secured ubiquity.mozilla.com. Also, for those of you who are writing commands, we’ve greatly improved the Ubiquity command editor.” For a full list of the add-on’s changes, see the release notes on the wiki.

Window Snyder on Mozilla security metrics

Gen Kenai posts, “Robert Vamosi of CNet interviews Window Snyder, Mozilla’s chief security something-or-other, on security metrics at Mozilla and how we are trying to better understand security in an open-source project platform: At Mozilla, blowing the lid off security practices.” It’s an interesting interview in which Window discusses the difficulty of measuring security, the metrics we use at Mozilla, and the questions around why and how to measure security over time. You can read the original article and watch the accompanying video at the CNet news website.

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

Subscribe to the email newsletter

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

When Ruby Inside started over two years ago, there were only a handful of sources for Ruby related news. The announcements on the ruby-talk mailing list (which Ruby Weekly News - now deceased - rounded up on the Web), del.icio.us, and a few popular Rubyists blogs (such as Why's Redhanded). Now, however, there are lots of options, including Ruby Inside itself, Rails Inside, RubyFlow, Ruby Reddit, and Planet Ruby on Rails.

But what about the Ruby and Rails news for non-English speakers? I've been keeping my eye on a number of foreign-language Ruby and Rails news sites, and want to highlight some of the best:

Russia / Россия / русско

RubyFlow.ru is a Russian equivalent of the English language RubyFlow.com. Like RubyFlow, it's a community blog where news about Ruby and Rails libraries, projects, tutorials, and so forth can be posted.

They've done an excellent job on the design - it rather makes me wish I could read Russian!

RubyMag is a new weekly summary of Ruby and Rails news for Russian speaking developers.

The Netherlands / Dutch / Nederlands

RubyWeb is a Dutch RubyFlow clone. There seem to be posts for most days, and it's primarily updated by "TomEric" of i76.

Ruby En Rails is a Dutch Rails-themed blog. It doesn't seem to be particularly well updated, but has news relating to Dutch Rails events, along with general tutorials written in Dutch.

China / 中国

Flow.RubyNow.com is a Chinese language equivalent of RubyFlow. It seems to mostly feature the same items as RubyFlow but in Chinese.

Japan / 日本 / 日本語

RubyFlow-ja is a Japanese language translation of RubyFlow, and the first such translation. It's maintained by Makota Kuwata - of Erubis fame. It features the most interesting of the RubyFlow stories (that is, not all of them).

The Rubyist is a long-time Japanese language online Ruby magazine. It has a very strong reputation in the Japanese Ruby community, but as the articles aren't translated into English, many Anglophone Rubyists are not aware of it. It's not to be confused with Jeremy McAnally's newer print-based The Rubyist magazine.

Indonesia

For some time, the official Indonesian Ruby site featured translations of choice Ruby Inside articles into Indonesian. This appears to have stopped recently, but it is still a key resource for Indonesian Rubyists.

Brazil / Brasil / Portuguese / Português

Ruby-Br.org is a key resource for Brazilian Ruby developers. It summarizes a lot of general Ruby news in Portuguese.

Akita on Rails is a Brazilian Rails-focused blog written by perhaps the most famous Brazilian Rubyist of all - Fabio Akita (who was the principal organizer of the successful Rails Summit Latin America conference recently).

Others? I Need Your Help!

I've been trying to find Ruby news sites in other popular languages, such as French and German, but have been drawing blanks. Where are French, German, Swedish, Danish, Spanish and Italian Ruby developers getting their news from? I want to turn this post into a resource for finding foreign language Ruby news sites, so please leave your links and suggestions in the comments.

This morning Earl Miles, also known as merlinofchaos, was named one of the 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People. Earl won specifically for his contributions to the Drupal project.

What is particularly exciting about this award is that Earl is the third Drupal community member to win an award for their contributions to the Drupal project this year. Bryan Ruby said it best.

What I found interesting is that most of the MVPs for projects were the projects' lead/founder. Perhaps that says something about Drupal truly being community driven.

Please congratulate Earl on a well deserved award for his contributions and leadership to the Drupal project. You can read Earl's response on his blog Angry Donuts.

Last week, Noel Rappin of Pathfinder Development wrote Elements of Ruby Style - an attempt at producing a Ruby "style guide." After some initial feedback to this, he's followed up with a response to some of the initial criticisms and suggestions.

Noel isn't the first to try to develop a Ruby style guide. In an attempt to promote Ruby's use within Google, Ian Macdonald wrote an extensive Ruby style guide back in 2006 (rather sadly, it appears his attempt did not work out).

What's a "Style Guide" then?

For those unfamiliar with style guides, the most famous for the English language are probably Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style (my personal favorite) - both attempt to define how to write and lay out English texts properly. Style guides for programming languages, however, usually attempt to not only define the "correct" way to write and lay out code but also the right idioms to use in certain situations.

Other Tools

Ruby style and "code smells" have become topics of interest for many Ruby developers recently:

• Last month, Kevin Rutherford released reek, a "code smells detector"
• Marty Andrews released Roodi, a tool that checks Ruby code for complexity
• flog is also a popular Ruby tool for testing and showing the complexity of your Ruby code.

Supported by Media72 Hosting: Looking for reliable UK Ruby on Rails hosting? Packages start from just £7/month on our mod_rails/apache stack hosted on fast UK servers and include free 24/7 support.

Following on from the highly successful MerbCamp, the Merb Framework took another big step this week with the announcement of the availability of release candidate 2 for it's upcoming 1.0 release (due within weeks now). No major changes and The Merbist blog lists mainly a focus on bug fixes and Windows compatibility:

The main focus for this release was to fix bugs and make the stack Windows compatible. We didn’t get any major bugs in RC1 but fixed a lot of small annoyances and problems with generated resources. We also made sure Merb itself would work properly with Windows (not using incompatible signals etc..) and we spent some time getting the Data Object sqlite3 drivers compiled on Windows.

Seems like a great time to begin playing around with Merb if you haven't yet. You can install / update Merb through RubyGems using sudo gem install merb

Ruby Inside is planning to run a resource packed feature on Merb when it hits 1.0, so keep your eyes peeled!

Support from: 1st Easy offers UK Rails hosting (dedicated and shared) running Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and LAMP stack. If you want to get to know us first, or simply want to evaluate the performance of your Rails applications running on Passenger, we'll arrange a trial hosting account for you (full technical support included!)

Download Drupal 6.6
Download Drupal 5.12

Drupal 6.6 and Drupal 5.12, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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A brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) - Mobile Orchard.

Mobile Orchard is a new iPhone developer news site, in a similar vein to Ruby Inside. We've already:

• filmed a 5 minute walkthrough of Android for iPhone developers
• shown 9 places you can go to promote your iPhone apps
• launched our podcast with a 30 minute interview with Hampton Catlin, well known in the Ruby and Rails scene (he invented Haml, for example) but who's also selling 1,000 copies a day of his iPhone application - we'll leave you to do the math at $1 per copy!
• and we're hoping to interview other Ruby and Rails developers using the iPhone platform! Could that be you? Get in touch!

There's a lot of money and a lot of excitement about the iPhone development community right now. Hampton Catlin says he's around the 48-50 mark in the "Top Paid iPhone App" list and he's selling 1,000 copies of his application each day, so if you can get into the top 10, you're going to be running a very serious business indeed.

Anyway, if you're an iPhone developer or are just interested in the platform, get over to Mobile Orchard and, ideally, subscribe to the feed or follow us on Twitter. If you don't want to do any of those things but want to wish us luck, you can do so in the comments here or save us on del.icio.us :)

Registration for DrupalCon DC is now open and the DrupalCon DC website live. In the two hours after the first announcement went out via Twitter, 200 people registered to come to DrupalCon! Discount tickets are still available at $175 a ticket - about 200 are left now so move quickly to make sure you get the lowest rate available. Also, there are already 18 sessions submitted and voting has begun - create a profile to vote on sessions and submit your own.

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In this issue…

• Firefox 3.1 beta 1 now available
• Thunderbird “Shredder” alpha 3 released
• First Mobile Firefox alpha released
• Impact Mozilla: last call for submissions
• Localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2
• Discussing Mozilla’s proposed 2010 goals
• Developer tools and the Open Web
• Ubiquity: turning bookmarklets into commands
• Add-on developers: it’s that time again
• Developer calendar
• Subscribe to the email newsletter

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 now available

Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform that are scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for this release can be followed at the Planning Center, as well as in the mozilla.dev.planning discussion group, and on IRC in the #shiretoko channel.

New features and changes in this release include: web standards improvements, added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to, improved control over the Smart Location Bar, support for the new video and audio elements, the addition of the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms, and improved support for offline applications.

More information about these features are available in several places including the Mozilla Developer Center’s Firefox 3.1 for Developers article, and in the Web Tech blog’s Overview of features for Web Developers post.

Thunderbird “Shredder” alpha 3 released

The third early release of Thunderbird (code-named Shredder) is now available. This release is called “alpha 3″ to emphasize its early nature and that it is not suited to regular, daily use. The alpha is available for testers, extension developers, and other people who are curious to follow the development of the next release of Thunderbird. Shredder Alpha 3 includes initial versions of some new features, and you can find more details on the release page and notes.

First Mobile Firefox alpha released

Mobile Firefox (code-named Fennec) has reached its Milestone 9 release, which is also its first alpha. The team is calling this the “User Experience alpha”, and it is targeted at the Nokia N800/N810 internet tablet. While great progress has been made on the Windows Mobile version, it is not ready for general use and is thus not included in this release. There are, however, new desktop versions of Fennec available, meaning you can now install the mobile browser on your Windows, OS X, or Linux desktop to see what all the fuss is about (and to help with testing and feedback, of course).

The Fennec Alpha 1 release notes include information about how to get started, how to install the browser, what’s new in this release, a list of known issues, and how to provide feedback. If you’ve ever been interested in getting involved with the Firefox Mobile project, now is a great time to install Fennec, watch the walkthrough video, and get started.

Impact Mozilla: last call for submissions

The Impact Mozilla community marketing challenge comes to a close on Friday October 24th, so this is your last opportunity to submit a one or two page idea summary. The purpose of this challenge is to help improve Firefox user retention. We know that tens of millions of people have downloaded Firefox but don’t continue to use it today. How do we get these past users back? How to we keep future users active once they’ve downloaded Firefox? If you have an idea about how we could solve this problem, we urge you to write it up and submit it through the Impact Mozilla website on or before this coming Friday.

Localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2

Seth Bindernagel has posted the localization schedule for Firefox 3.1 beta 2. The string freeze is going to be on Thursday, October 30 at 11:59pm (Mountain View time), which is just over a week from now. Code freeze will be Tuesday, November 4 at 11:59pm (Mountain View time). If you did not make Firefox 3.1 beta 1, we would love for you to participate in this next beta release. We have a goal of releasing a fully localized beta, so please let us know what we can do to help you get into the second beta. For more information and links to the localization team tools, please see Seth’s weblog post.

Discussing Mozilla’s proposed 2010 goals

Last month, Mitchell Baker posted a list of proposed goals she believes Mozilla should work towards achieving by 2010. Now Mitchell is looking to expand and continue the discussion around these proposed goals, and she has written a blog post outlining the next steps we’ll be taking towards ensuring that the whole Mozilla community has an opportunity to participate in the discussion and provide thoughts and feedback. “Mozilla has many groups of people who work together on particular aspects of Mozilla products, technology, adoption and mission. These groups are a natural setting for discussing the overall goals of the Mozilla project, and what motivates people to contribute. With that in mind, we’re planning a set of discussions to give more people a chance to participate comfortably. Some of these will be face-to-face meetings; others will be online discussions.” For more information about these smaller group discussions and other forums that are available for ongoing feedback, see Mitchell’s blog post.

Developer tools and the Open Web

Mozilla Labs recently announced the formation of a new group that will focus on the research and development of developer tools for the Open Web. “We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.” Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience, and long-time supporters of the Open Web have joined Mozilla in a full-time capacity to lead the new project. For more information, please see the Mozilla Labs blog post.

Ubiquity: turning bookmarklets into commands

Aza Raskin has put together a short video tutorial on how to turn your Firefox bookmarklets into Ubiquity commands. “Bookmarklets are clickable actions (technically a link containing some Javascript) that can be added to the bookmarks bar of your browser. They’re a good way of getting control of the web back into users’ hands, by allowing them to add whatever new functionality they want to the websites they visit. The main problem with bookmarklets is that they don’t provide a scalable solution for accessing their functionality. You can only have so many buttons on the toolbar before they become unusable.” There’s a new utility function in Ubiquity that makes it trivial to turn any bookmarklet into a Ubiquity command, and Aza’s video tutorial shows you how to do it.

Add-on developers: it’s that time again

Justin Scott writes, “With the release of the first beta of Firefox 3.1 comes everyone’s favorite release-time festivity: extension compatibility updates! If you’re an extension developer using a maxVersion of 3.0.* or less, please test your extension before declaring 3.1b1 compatibility. Some of the changes for extension developers are listed [at the Mozilla Developer Center]. 3.1.b1 is an allowed version on AMO, but 3.1.* will not be added until closer to final release. Keep in mind that you can always look at the Developer Statistics Dashboard to see how many of your users are on 3.1 betas and may be marked as incompatible/disabled.” For more information you should check out Justin’s blog post.

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

Subscribe to the email newsletter

If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.

Over a year ago we had a post about how to build OS X GUI applications with Ruby and RubyCocoa. Since then, however, MacRuby has arrived on the scene. Not just the regular version of Ruby with some bindings to Cocoa, MacRuby is as native to OS X as JRuby is native to the JVM.

It's a significant development, then, that Apple has created a very in-depth tutorial called Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby. It's very comprehensive. The tutorial introduces you to MacRuby, walks you through installation, demonstrates Objective-C bindings, and steps through using XCode and MacRuby to develop a simple GUI application. If you want to read a single tutorial and be able to develop a Mac GUI app with Ruby from start to finish, this is currently the tutorial to read.

That said, you might still appreciate our Ultimate List of RubyCocoa Tutorials, Tips, and Tools. There are 42 links there; many of which are still incredibly useful.

Three and a half months ago, Views, along with CCK and OG were made available as a release candidates. Today, I've finally come to the conclusion that the remaining bugs are minor enough to go ahead with an official, formal release of Views 2, and we can finally say that this module is now out and available. Yes, it actually beat Panels 2 to final release!

If you've never tried Views 2, or are hesitating about Drupal 6, this new release of Views is a very good reason to consider making the transition, especially in your new sites.

The Views module has undergone extensive development, refactoring, and testing. Views 2 improves the existing functionality of the Views module, and adds new features designed to simplify life for developers, site admins, themers, and end users alike.

Possibly the most important change is that Views can now create lists of anything: nodes, users, taxonomy -- you name it! Another large change you'll notice right off the bat is that the UI for Views has completely changed, and is full of JavaScripty goodness. While it may take some getting used to initially, we're confident that you'll find that the changes ultimately make creating views much easier than before.

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With only the performance of a scripting language, Ruby isn't considered a particularly suitable choice for intense video work (direct transcoding, encoding, and the like.). Nonetheless, there are a handful of Ruby libraries and Ruby-based technologies you can use to work with video and movie files - primarily through interacting with faster tools or libraries.

RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library)

RMov is an awesome new Ruby library by Ryan Bates that wraps around Apple's QuickTime API and allows you to open, edit, and export QuickTime movies from within Ruby. It is, unfortunately, OS X only.

RVideo (Ruby Video Processing)

RVideo (Github) is a Ruby library that interfaces with tools like ffmpeg to let you inspect and process video and audio files. For example, you can use RVideo to help you convert videos into FLVs.

Panda (Video Encoding and Streaming Platform)

Panda is a Ruby-powered open source "video uploading, encoding and streaming" solution. While it uses Ruby as an interface (in the shape of a Merb application), it relies on tried and tested tools like FFMpeg to do the heavy lifting but may be perfect if you have an Amazon EC2 account and fancy offloading the CPU intense video work.

Hey!Spread (Video Promotion Web Service)

Hey!Spread makes it easy to upload videos to YouTube and Google Video - each operation essentially becoming a method.

Fliqz4R ("White-Label YouTube" API)

Fliqz is a provider of "plug and play video solutions." Effectively they provide the backend infrastructure for hosting and playing videos, a kind of white-label YouTube, if you will. Libin Pan has put together a tutorial that demonstrates how to use Fliqz from Ruby / Rails using the Fliqz4R Rails plugin.

Any other libraries to recommend? Leave a comment.

As of today, October 16 2008, everyone with a user account on Drupal.org is able to edit most handbook pages (details are noted below). All users can already create new pages in the handbooks so this expands on that to allow editing of pages other than those you created. In the past this has been permitted only for members of the documentation team or site maintainers.

This new permission is currently set to last for a trial period of one month. At the end of the period, on November 15 2008, the documentation team and site maintainers will assess if the trial has been successful and make a decision whether to continue to allow open editing. If the change causes too much spam or vandalism in the handbook, then we will be forced to revoke open editing. If we are unsure, we may decide to extend the trial period in one month increments until we can firmly make a decision one way or the other.

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DrupalCon is THE conference for Drupal developers, and it's coming to Washington, DC, March 4 – 7, 2009! For those new to the DrupalCons, this is a huge unconference for developers. It's a time for us to get together, learn from each other, trade ideas, make decisions, and build a stronger community.

There will be a special early bird rate of $125 per ticket for the first 100 people who register. Tickets won't go on sale until next week, but we wanted to give everyone a heads up so they can be on the lookout. We'll announce when DrupalCon DC registration goes live via Twitter, and will let followers get a two-hour head start before we get the word out elsewhere. So, follow us: http://twitter.com/drupalcon.

See you in Washington, DC in March!

A week ago, in a story published by eWeek.com, Darryl K. Taft asked "Can Ruby and Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?"

The general gist is that with a generally lower total cost of development, projects using Ruby and Rails will continue to increase, and even thrive in a recession, ensuring the success of Ruby and Rails developers. An analyst with Forrester, John Rymer, however, countered:

I respectfully suggest that the type of application someone is working on is a more important factor than language usage. In a downturn, companies tend to go back to basics.

Whatever the final outcome, Ruby's popularity is still increasing. Dean Cruse of Five Runs weighs in with his own opinion - namely that "Rails represents a low risk investment for the IT organization," due to its open source nature. Of 154 people polled in Dean's post, currently 44% see more opportunities for Rails developers heading into a recession, against only 15% who see "major cutbacks" ahead.

Koders.com Sees 20x Increase in Ruby Searches

Further, this week, Black Duck Software, the company behind the popular Koders.com search engine, has announced that it has seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of Ruby on its code search site with the number of Ruby-related searches having increased 20 times since 2004. They've also announced that they're crawling more Ruby sources than ever, now including all of RubyForge. Tom Copeland, RubyForge's sys-admin, is delighted:

Black Duck’s search data confirms the tremendous growth that we are seeing within the community of Ruby developers. It’s great to see a leading code search site like Koders.com index RubyForge because it represents another way to make the projects in our community available to tens of thousands of developers worldwide.

4 million Rubyists by 2013?

IT research company Gartner, Inc. are also convinced that Ruby's popularity is on the up, and the Ruby ecosystem will reach 4 million developers worldwide by 2013. Mark Driver, research VP at Gartner, Inc. says:

[..] Ruby will enjoy a higher concentration among corporate IT developers than typical, dynamic ‘scripting’ languages, such as PHP.

I'm not entirely buying this yet, but if it becomes true and Ruby leapfrogs PHP in the corporate environment, you could be looking at some pretty interesting years ahead as a Ruby developer!

But Python Might Be Moving Faster..

On the other hand, Ruby is still hovering at #10 in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, a position it's held for over a year now. While TIOBE's index isn't incredibly accurate, it makes a good indicator, and even Delphi has resurged back ahead of Ruby in the last year, and Python appears to be moving up the charts a lot quicker than Ruby.

The Manning Publications Company recently announced two new books about Drupal. Manning is a well known publisher of many high quality technical books and the popular "in Action" series. Their decision to release two books about Drupal highlights the growth of interest in the Drupal platform. Manning's decision to work with established members of the Drupal community and also donate a portion of sales to the Drupal Association shows their desire to be a responsible member of the Drupal world.

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Please note: Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes many new features as well as improvements to performance, web compatibility, and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.1 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
• Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
• A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
• Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
• Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.

More information about new web developer features are available in the Web Tech blog post.

Testers can download Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 builds for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in 36 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3.1 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

Want to retrieve weather conditions in your Ruby script / application? There are four great solutions: WeatherMan, RWeather, rubyweather, and the Yahoo Weather Ruby API.

RWeather

RWeather, by Carlos Kozuszko, is a Ruby wrapper for the Weather XML data feed from The Weather Channel's weather.com. Carlos has put together a basic tutorial / overview of the library's use. Currently it has two main features: searching for locations, and then retrieving the current weather for locations of your choice. It's a nice, simple library.

WeatherMan

WeatherMan, by Jared Pace, goes a little deeper than RWeather. Jared wanted to add the ability to retrieve forecasts to RWeather, but upon finding no easy way to integrate it with RWeather's structure, he decided to produce WeatherMan instead (also his first ever gem release!). Jared says:

WeatherMan implements most of the weather.com XML API. It it based in part on RWeather but adds some functionality and is structured slightly differently. With it you can search for locations, get current conditions and forecasts for a location, and access the promotional links that weather.com asks you to display when using the API.

WeatherMan requires the installation of the xml-simple gem beforehand, but otherwise generally appears to offer a much wider range of features than RWeather. Jared's example code samples are compelling in their power and simplicity.

rubyweather

rubyweather is a lot older than WeatherMan but offers some of the same functionality. As with RWeather and WeatherMan, it uses Weather.com's data. Full documentation is available at http://rubyweather.rubyforge.org/

Yahoo! Weather API

Want to get weather from a source that isn't weather.com (as with the three libraries above)? Yahoo! has an option. yahoo-weather provides an object-oriented interface to the Yahoo! Weather XML RSS feed. You can quickly install with gem install yahoo-weather and the code examples given within the official documentation will get you up and running in no time.

I find the simplicity of Yahoo's offering very attractive, and you don't need to be signed up or registered in any way - you can get going in as long as it takes to copy and paste some code!

Post supported by: ActionGear is a menu-bar app for task management on your Mac. It's lightweight, quick, and helps you get stuff done. Try it out for free.

In this issue…

• Mozilla Labs in Europe next week
• Introducing Geode
• New Mozilla public relations weblog
• SUMO: Article editor ideas wanted
• Firefox accessibility team needs your help
• SVG external document references
• Audio, Video, Geolocation, and Media queries documentation
• Help wanted: QA Companion Firefox add-on
• Ubiquity progress
• SUMO: Live Chat and community participation
• MozAfterPaint: new experimental API
• Developer calendar
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Mozilla Labs in Europe next week

Aza Raskin writes, “Mozilla Labs will be making its way to Europe next week to meet with community members, hackers, bloggers, media types, and general feasance doers. We’ll be spending time in London, Berlin, and Barcelona. We’ll be having Labs nights, Hack sessions, or drinks in each of the cities. They are open to everyone, so we hope you can join us!” More details, including a rough schedule of events, are available at Aza’s weblog.

Introducing Geode

Geode is a new add-on that allows developers to begin experimenting with geolocation technologies and concepts in Firefox 3. Future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and for you to optionally grant access to, your location. These should be available for users to play with in upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, as well as alpha releases of Mobile Firefox (Fennec). Geode provides an early implementation of this new technology so developers can work on and test concepts that include location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today. The add-on includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data. The initial Mozilla Labs blog post includes lots of information about how Geode works, where to download it, some ideas of how it could be used, and how to participate in discussing ideas and possible experiments. Aza Raskin has also written a follow up post about Geode that delves into some of the questions that have emerged about the add-on since its initial release.

New Mozilla public relations weblog

Mozilla’s PR team has unveiled a brand new weblog called “Above the Fold: Mozilla in the News”. “Above the Fold is a place where the community can come to gain insight into public relations at Mozilla. We will keep track of news cycles around announcements, competitor news and general industry trends. We’ll then provide context around why particular articles and dialogues are important to Mozilla.” If you’ve ever been interested in public relations, how it works and what it all means, you should keep an eye on Above the Fold.

SUMO: Article editor ideas wanted

The team over at support.mozilla.com (SUMO) is looking for ideas about how to improve the SUMO Knowledge Base editor system. Discussion and feedback is happening over on the SUMO Contributors forum, and there is still time for you to post your thoughts and ideas about the problems you have with the current editor and possible ways to fix those issues. A list of some of the problems and solutions that have already been posted is available over on the SUMO blog.

Firefox accessibility team needs your help

Marco Zehe writes, “If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty a bit and would like to help the Firefox accessibility team, now would be a good time to get involved. The code that calculates the names for any created accessibles has been growing over time and became largely unmaintainable. New features such as adding the aria-label property support requires code duplication for HTML and XUL, and in general the code has many stylish un-niceties. Our team has started a code cleanup and code refactoring series to get the code into better shape.” As with any refactor, there is a risk of regressions that cannot be discounted. The team is looking for help in testing for these possible regressions and for help filling in any gaps that exist in the suite of available testcases. This is a really great way to get involved with Mozilla development efforts, so if you’re interested in helping out you should read Marco’s blog post to get started.

SVG external document references

In a post over at the Web Tech weblog, it has been announced that SVG external document references have landed on trunk in time for the second beta of Gecko 1.9.1 and Firefox 3.1. “What this means is that the SVG element being used as fill, clip path, mask, filter, svg:use target, or marker no longer needs to be in the same document as the element being filled, masked, filtered, etc. In particular, what this means is that the preceding post about SVG effects in HTML content now applies to HTML documents, not just XHTML.” For further details and a link to a small demo, see the Web Tech blog post. Robert O’Callahan has also written about recent SVG development on his weblog.

Audio, Video, Geolocation, and Media queries documentation

Eric Shepherd has been hard at work documenting some of the exciting new web technologies that are slated for inclusion in Firefox 3.1. The first of these is the HTML 5 audio element that is used to embed sound content in an HTML or XHTML document. Similarly, the HTML 5 video element documentation is available, explaining how to use this element to embed video content. Eric has also put together a “Using geolocation” article that introduces the new geolocation API that is being developed for Firefox 3.1. Finally, the documentation for CSS media queries — allowing different style sheets to be selected based on very precise criteria — has been finished.

Help wanted: QA Companion Firefox add-on

Clint Talbert writes, “Zach Lipton and Ben Hsieh created the QA Companion Add-on. This is an extension that sits in a little window outside Firefox or Thunderbird and helps you run litmus tests against the application. It has helped hundreds of people when testing Firefox, and has become a central part of our QA Test Day events. The QA Companion has great potential, lots of poeple have thought about ways to do more interesting mash-ups with it, including integrating some of the Nightly Tester Tool functionality, integrating Mozilla automation UI, etc. If you’ve always wanted to work on an Add-on but it seemed like too big of an undertaking, this is a great opportunity. The base code is already written, and it’s all pretty straightforward. Together, we can design a new direction for the tool and make it a really useful item for all the testers out there in Mozilla Land.” If you’re interested in helping the QA team out with the development and maintenance of the Companion, Clint asks that you leave a comment over on his blog post.

Ubiquity progress

A release candidate for Ubiquity 0.1.2 has been made available, and the team is asking for help with testing. 0.1.2 contains a preliminary version of the parser-localization API that Jonathan DiCarlo discussed in an earlier blog post, and that he has described in detail in his parser localization API tutorial. Complete release notes are available for 0.1.2, and further information about and download links for the release candidate are available at Jonathan’s weblog.

SUMO: Live Chat and community participation

Matthew Middleton, the new leader of the SUMO Live Chat project, has written an interesting article about the Live Chat facility and its contributor community. “One great thing about support as a community is that the line between user and helper is blurred. Many of the current support volunteers got started by asking a question themselves, staying around to help other people using information learned solving their own problems. While most users don’t have time to commit regularly, many users have spent extra time to troubleshoot an issue, to let us know what finally fixed a problem, or to post advice in the forum. The support community allows new helpers to learn about Mozilla and support in general, while actively helping users solve problems.” As always, the SUMO team could use more help, and if you think Live Chat might be right for you, you should read Matthew’s post to find out how to get started.

MozAfterPaint: new experimental API

As posted on the Web Tech blog, the Firefox 3.1 team has created a very experimental API for Firefox 3.1 that fires an event every time content is repainted. “The event is called MozAfterPaint and is fired at the document, bubbling up to the window. The event offers two attributes, clientRects and boundingClientRect, which tell you what was repainted, using the same objects and coordinate system as the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods. This is very useful for Firefox extensions and other ‘chrome’ code that might be using the canvas.drawWindow method to capture the contents of windows. It might also be useful for tools like Firebug. But it’s also potentially useful for regular content, for example if you want to add some lightweight JS instrumentation to a page to measure what gets painted by Firefox, and when.” For more information about this new API, read the post over on Web Tech.

Developer calendar

For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page.

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Giles Bowkett is anything but a quiet chap - indeed, he's one of the more outspoken members of our community. With the roar, however, comes a lot of wisdom, and Giles recent work on integrating Ruby and MIDI is inspired.

In July, Giles attended the RubyFringe conference and gave a talk with the unpronounceable title of "Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator", named after his Archaeopteryx project. This talk has been very well received generally. Pete Forde of Unspace called it "the most important video of 2008", Pete Yandell said it's the "must-watch geek talk of the year" and Zed Shaw said Giles "Ruled The World." It's an awesome talk, even if music and MIDI don't interest you. Giles covers building an ecosystem around your projects very well - if you're feeling uninspired, give it a look.

If you are interested in music and MIDI, however, start digging in to Archaeopteryx right away. It's billed as a "Ruby MIDI generator" but as of this week it now also accepts MIDI in. Awesomeness ensues.

Related links:

• Screencast of Archaeopteryx using GarageBand
• Screencast of Archaeopteryx producing "dynamic techno" from code
• How to create a MIDI file from scratch in Ruby
• The "midilib" library