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Monkeybars is a library that enables you to make use of Swing from JRuby.
Monkeybars aims to allow you to continue using the GUI editing tools you are used to but makes it easy to write all your application logic in pure Ruby. In fact, with most editors you’ll never even have to look at Java code.
ActiveScaffold is a plugin for Ruby on Rails (also known as Rails) that provides dynamic model-based view generation. Instead of having to create pages by hand that display your models, ActiveScaffold will introspect your ActiveRecord models and dynamically generate a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface for managing those objects.
Installing ActiveScaffold
As ActiveScaffold is a Rails plugin, you can install it from a remote Web or Subversion server. The command below will check out the ActiveScaffold plugin from the ActiveScaffold Subversion server.
Install the latest version of the plugin:
script/plugin install http://activescaffold.googlecode.com/svn/tags/active_scaffoldAdd this to your layout:
Now that Leopard, the latest release of Mac OS X, is available to everyone, you may wonder what has changed from the Ruby developer’s perspective.
Ruby
Ruby in Leopard was framework’ized. It is now available in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework. Compatibility with the previous directory layout is preserved, /usr/bin/ruby and /usr/lib/ruby
Let see the example symbolic links that point inside the framework:
$ readlink /usr/bin/ruby ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/bin/ruby $ readlink /usr/lib/ruby ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/ruby $ readlink /usr/lib/libruby.1.dylib ../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/libruby.1.dylib
IRB
Now that readline support is available, IRB has command-line editing and history support.
Ruby is one the most popular scripting languages that, with Mac OS X version 10.5 (Leopard), is becoming even more significant alternative for software development on Mac OS X, especially with additional support for bridges between the scripting languages and Cocoa and Open Scripting Architecture (OSA).
If you simply want to write simple GUI desktop applications, Ruby with Shoes is a quick way to do it.
Example session in my computer:
The code for that Timer GUI application is taken from the Shoes samples, which is concise enough for me to put it here:
Shoes.app :height => 150, :width => 250 do
background rgb(240, 250, 208)
stack :margin => 10 do
button "Start" do
@time = Time.now
@label.replace "Stop watch started at #@time"
end
button "Stop" do
@label.replace "Stopped, ", strong("#{Time.now - @time}"), " seconds elapsed."
end
@label = para "Press ", strong("start"), " to begin timing."
end
end
To install Shoes on Ubuntu, it needs some dependencies which fortunately are very easy to install:
NetBeans 6 Beta 1 is here!!
Let’s rock the boat 
It’s the first significant NetBeans event in probably a year
NetBeans isn’t only for Java geeks anymore, it has tons of Ruby and Ruby on Rails support now!
What surprises me (and delights me!) about this release is that, not like previous NetBeans 6 milestones where NetBeans-Java is bundled with Ruby, they actually make a special Ruby-only version.
The Ruby-only download is mere 19 MB in size!
Profligacy is a JRuby library that makes building Swing Graphical User Interface much easier than with Raw code. It’s not a builder as with many other projects, but instead a simple Ruby way to structure the UI for the 80% common cases you’ll encounter.
It’s actively used in the Utu iHate client. iHate started as a RubyCocoa project and then convert to JRuby and Swing.
The purpose of Profligacy is not to be a complete way of hiding Swing components from you. You’ll still be making JButtons and JLabels, you’ll just be putting them into a Ruby idiomatic code structure that doesn’t make your eyes hemorrhage diarrhea like when you try to code in Java.
