Extra Thimian

A few days before New Years, I posted how neat it’d be if we had a Ruby Appliance. This, and the mail to the ruby-talk mailing list has resulted in a couple of results already.

For one, we found a name: Ruby Zen, which fits quite well, and is appropriately Web 2.0 without being unintelligible.

For another: rubyzen.org has been registered, and we are feverishly working on getting the website up and some content, too.

We are also working on evaluating Linux distros, with Gentoo, Turnkey Linux, and Ubuntu being hot candidates for the appliance’s operating system.

We’ve also decided to focus on Ruby 1.9.1.

The guys over at gemcutter.org were so kind to provide me with a quick dump of the top 100 hottest gems, so we can pick some great gems to start with.

Unfortunately, this is happening behind closed doors of sorts, since, at the moment, we are using Google Wave which is still closed to the general public. However, if you leave me a comment here, we can organize a handful Wave invites for certain! (I still got 5 or 6 left from the first batch alone.)

So, what else?

Future plans!

In the short term:

• Get a website up for easy contribution (and to move the development process in the public, where it belongs, it’s done by the community for the community, after all)
• Have a prototype VM ready in a couple of days
• Get more contributors. You can help if: You can test a virtual machine, read proposals and comment on them (provide a reality check! Always good!), write a tutorial (maybe for your favorite gem, or Ruby feature)
• Got TikiWiki experience? I’d be glad to hear from you, if you could lend a hand in implementing features (like an issue tracker, or user wiki page).

So, yeah, the Ruby Appliance isn’t forgotten. Considering that this was between the years we did get quite a bit done yet. Thanks to every one (here or on Ruby Talk) who contributed already.

Filed under: English Language Posts, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software development by Phill