Ruby Tuesday #29 : Iron Ruby 0.5

IronRuby 0.5 was released last week – you can get it here.  Read Jimmy Schementi’s post for more info – I’d also recommend that you read his post about his presentation at RailsConf 2009.  For those of you exploring .NET 4, there’s a CTP of IronRuby available here (this version is roughly equivalent to the IronRuby 0.3 release. ) Having downloaded IronRuby 0.5, I set about following these instructions to run IronRuby on Rails – this is a sign of the progress that IronRuby is making.  It’s worth pointing out that there’s some info about deploying Ruby web apps via IIS and Rack in Jimmy’s RailsConf 2009 post.  Also released last week was version 0.91 of the DLR, which you can grab here. 

I Know What You Did Last PoC

Here’s a video that looks at the Intelligent Cities Proof of Concept I worked on recently.  Apparently, the beginning of the video is a little spooky…

AIC 2009 – Dynamic Languages and Architecture

Thanks to all of you who attended my session at AIC earlier today.  The slides will be made available on line over the next week or so. 

I think the interesting capability made possible by the DLR is using static languages and dynamic languages together.  And there’s another benefit of learning a new language: when we only use one language we tend to think in that language – having other languages in our toolkit means that we have other approaches available to us.

So, where can you start to take advantage of dynamic languages?  The areas I discussed today were:

• extending your application by adding scripting support to your application
• configuring your application with a dynamic language
• creating a DSL using a dynamic language
• writing one or more layers of your architecture in a dynamic language
• testing your application(s) with a dynamic language

Of all of these, extending and testing are probably the best places to start.

I also talked a bit about the DLR (and a couple of the Iron Languages – Iron Python and Iron Ruby) and the way that C# will be taking advantage of the DLR. It’s fascinating to see the evolution of programming languages and how the trends of dynamic, functional and concurrent programming are influencing this evolution.

Here are the links that I gave out in my session:

•http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython

•http://ironruby.net/

•http://www.codeplex.com/dlr

•http://devhawk.net/

•http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/

•Dynamic Languages on .NET (www.microsoftpdc.com)

•http://ironpython-urls.blogspot.com/

http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/

I also mentioned the Anders Hejlsberg session on the future of C# – you can watch that here – and a Channel 9 video of Anders Hejlsberg and Gilad Bracha discussing language design, which you can find here.

As part of the preparation for the session, I exchanged some emails with a few folks including Michael Foord.  For those of you who’d like to see Michael’s take on this subject, he’s posted about it here.

Ruby Tuesday #28 : Architect Insight Conference

This Friday the fourth annual Architect Insight Conference will roll into town – this year the town is London.  I’ll be speaking about dynamic languages from an architectural perspective and how and when you can incorporate them into your architecture.