While you were out
I managed to recover my laptop battery within two weeks of good charging practices and despite its old age. It’s an ASUS, just in case you were interested, and it’s been serving me well since the last quarter of 2001 when I bought it.
As an aside note, I am amazed by the speed gain of Eclipse 3.1.1 compared to Eclipse 3.0 running on said laptop.
Sam Ruby showed us how good open source works. I don’t know if FeedTools is the right project to follow for introducing feed reading or writing capabilities into the Ruby world (a database backend needed?) but on the other hand I don’t see anything particularly exciting on the horizon, and I have been skeptical even about the RSS library officially included in the standard Ruby distribution.
I also rediscovered some older code review as another example of how much a community of developers can help projects and people improving.
I’ve been keeping up the work on RubyFIT and now I’m quite confident it can be used with real domain objects rather than just arrays and what in Java parlance are called primitive types. Other changes are coming, so if you are interested, please stay tuned!
Yeah, stay tuned but please on this station: I have closed my previous Through the blogging-glass weblog. Five months of hiatus have convinced me that something in the publishing process had to be changed if I want to try to rescue my blogging activity. So I’m moving to an hosted weblog here on WordPress.com. Archives for the old weblog will remain untouched on its server anyway. From now on you can find my musings at this new home called The Long Dark Tea-time of the Blog.
A database backend is not needed for FeedTools. If you set FeedTools.feed_cache to nil, the cache will be disabled. In fact, if a connection to the cache can’t be established, it simply treats the cache as disabled anyways.
However, in a way, you’re quite right. FeedTools is not trying to be *the* feed parsing library for Ruby. It has a very specific purpose, and I’m just happy that other people find it useful too.
While the Universal Feed Parser is generally regarded as a good and useful library, the standard Python distribution does not include it. On the other hand, Ruby has tried to sneak an RSS library into its standard library, but last time I checked I came away with the impression it was a move done a bit in a rush.
So, a library able to parse not only RSS, and to offer writing capabilities and even a cache option (thanks for clarifying!) could be a valid substitute… At least, something the community could “push” as an official substitute. The attention you got from Sam Ruby seemed to me to a viable path in that direction.
But I can understand your willing to stay with your current project’s aim.