I'm searching for a tool that will take a source directory and produce a single PDF containing the source code, preferably with syntax highlighting.
I would like to read the PDF on my phone, in order to get familiar with a code-base, or just to see what I can learn by reading a lot of code. I will most often be reading Ruby.
I would prefer if the tool ran on Linux. I don't mind paying for a tool if it is particularly good.
Any suggestions?
You could wipe something up yourself with Prawn and Ultraviolet.
PDF is no good for reflowing. You might like a html based solution better.
And in reading existing code, a lineair model is no good. You need to jump from one file to the other. A hypertext model with history would probably work best on the limited screen estate of a phone. It should borrow some features of the smalltalk IDEs (jump to senders, implementors).
For the UI, take a look at clamato
GNU source-highlight supports many languages and can output LaTeX in particular that can be converted to pdf.
The SciTE editor can export the currently edited file (with syntax highlighting) to PDF (and HTML, RTF, LaTeX and XML).
Alas, it doesn't have batch conversion capability, but IIRC somebody made a batch tool out of this code base.
I realize this is very late, but I wanted to do the same thing, except I wanted it for my tablet, which is a Galaxy Note 10.1 with a Wacom digitizer that I can use to annotate code. I found that one good solution is to use Doxygen to generate a PDF which will have hyperlinks and everything you would want in a PDF. For my use case, I would pair it with EzPDF on Android to annotate the code. This was also for the purpose of learning a new codebase. In the end I ended up not using the generated PDF but it was pretty usable.
At my institution, we have a small library with 150 books and 50
users. We would like to use a simple online management system that
displays the books, lets users search and enter when they get and
return a book. (There is no librarian, the books are just in an
otherwise empty room.)
I'm not familiar with modern web content management systems. In the
old days, I would have just implemented a quick Perl/CGI script, but I
think there are better options nowadays?
What would be the simplest way to get/implement such a system? Django?
Ruby on Rails? Ideally, I'd like to just run it in my user account
without having to install database support etc.
Is it possible to do everything on one dynamic HTML page? What role
does AJAX play in such a system?
I suggest take a look at the available open source tools for libraries before deciding to build one from scratch:
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Open_Source_Software#Great_Free.2FOpen_Source_Tools_for_Libraries
Another good resource in your research: http://www.oss4lib.org/
If you find an existing tool that fits the bill (or enough to make it worth extending), that will be important in guiding what platform/language/framework and techniques will be best to use.
If you want a quick and easy solution, you might want to consider using SQLite as the database backend, since it does not require any configuration or setup (except for the tables, of course).
If you have a machine standing around there, you could take a look at Qt/C++ or PyQt to create a simple user interface.
Pylons (there are lots of alternatives!) or any other web framework might do the job as well, but I guess it would be more work to create a web application than a quick and simple desktop application for this job.
This is quite a complicated question doesn't have a simple answer. The best I can do is point you in the direction of some resources to get you started:
Framework/CMS
Unfortunately, most frameworks require at least some minimal kind of db interaction. While this is not true for all, it would probably be easiest to steer clear of a framework, you probably don't need that much overhead anyway.
Javascript/AJAX
If you want things to happen without any seperate pageloads, then sure, you can use some ajax. However, you probably don't need anything this sophisiticated
How I Would Do It
If you really trusted your students enough to be diligent about checking in/out books, I think it would be easiest to just have a form on a webpage somewhere that they could enter the number of the book they are checking in/out. Then store the state of each book in a text file somewhere (you said you didn't want to use any db's), or even look into sqlite.
Again, you probably don't need all the overhead of a full framework/CMS. It would be fairly trivial to, as you said, write a quick script to handle the ISDN, ID, Title, Whatever of the book they are checking in/out.
Also, there are significantly easier languages to write scripts in these days than Perl and CGI. Try PHP, Ruby, or Java
Basically, I'm looking for a least common denominator declarative GUI language that would be perfectly suitable for rendering with JavaScript to HTML/CSS, with Python to wxPython and with C# to WinForms... emphasis on the least common denominator. Otherwise, I'm perfectly aware this is almost impossible. Basically, JSON for declarative GUIs rather than data.
Oh yeah, and the real kicker: no XML. Period. Ideally, the syntax would be something like Markdown where it doesn't look like code.
If you don't know of any such thing, you can just post some ideas on what you think it should look like and how you think it should (or could) work, because I was planning on creating one myself. I'm just making sure I'm not reinventing the wheel.
Sounds like you're tired of XML. If you don't like Snow (see above) try curl http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/curl/
Qooxdoo is an awesome GUI technology for the web. There is a new serialization project called Tartan Blueprint that allows the generation of Qooxdoo client apps from serialized JSON. Its pure JSON and OO javascript. No XML. The JSON can be generated by hand or by any code that can generate valid JSON. Take a look...
The announcement:
http://news.qooxdoo.org/the-week-in-qooxdoo-2009-10-02
I think it's safe to say after 3 months that the answer is no.
Well, HTML kind of aspires to that. How about wiki markup?
Have you seen Snow?
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Sometimes it feels that my company is the only company in the world using Ruby but not Ruby on Rails, to the point that Rails has almost become synonymous with Ruby.
I'm sure this isn't really true, but it'd be fun to hear some stories about non-Rails Ruby usage out there.
One of the huge benefits of Ruby is the ability to create DSLs very easily. Ruby allows you to create "business rules" in a natural language way that is usually easy enough for a business analyst to use. Many Ruby apps outside of web development exist for this purpose.
I highly recommend Googling "ruby dsl" for some excellent reading, but I would like to leave you with one post in particular. Russ Olsen wrote a two part blog post on DSLs. I saw him give a presentation on DSLs and it was very good. I highly recommend reading these posts.
I also found this excellent presentation on Ruby DSLs by Obie Fernandez. Highly recommended reading!
I use Ruby extensively in my work, and none of it is Rails (or even web) based.
My domain is usually client-side Windows applications (wxRuby GUI) and scripts, automating Excel, Internet Explorer, SQL Server queries and report generation (win32ole COM automation). I also use the sqlite, pdf-writer, and gruff libraries for various data munging and graph generation tasks.
Rails' success has been great for Ruby, but I agree that Rails has received so much attention that Ruby's value beyond the web is often overlooked.
We are mainly a C++ shop, but we've found several areas where Ruby has proven quite useful. Here are a few:
Code Generation - Built several DSLs to generate C++/Java/C# code from single input files
Build Support
scripts to generate Makefiles for unix from Visual Studio Project Files
scripts for building projects and formatting the output for Cruise Control
scripts for running our unit tests and formatting the output for Cruise Control
scripts for manipulating Visual Studio projects and solutions from the command line
Integration Tests - We can crank out tests much quicker and cleaner using Ruby than C++
QA's entire testing suite is written in Ruby
Ruby is basically my go to tool for where it makes sense. And it makes sense in a lot of places.
Google Sketchup uses Ruby as an embedded scripting language. You can use it to perform all sorts of 3d modeling and import/export tasks. The scripting works with the free version and there's even decent documentation.
Ruby with a homebrew extension written in C++ does all the heavy pixel pushing for my photography processing. I was using Python+numpy but when doing artsy stuff, Ruby is just more fun. Also the relative lack of, or lesser maturity of, good image processing libraries makes me feel less like i'm reinventing wheels. I am clueless about Rails, other than i've heard of it, have a fuzzy idea what it is, and actually have a book on it (unopened)
We use Watir (Ruby library) to test our .net web application.
Check out Shoes, a simple API for building GUIs in Ruby aimed at novice programmers.
Or you could use Ruby to make music ala Giles Bowkett's Archaeopteryx. This presentation by Giles about Archaeopteryx is one of the best presentations ever. I highly recommend it.
RubyCocoa and MacRuby. Possible to make full Cocoa-based GUI apps without Rails. And then you get to use Interface Builder, too.
I worked on a museum project last year that used a lot of Ruby. (http://http://ourspace.tepapa.com/home)
The part that I spent most of my time on was an interactive floor map. The Map on the floor has sensors so when people walk on it lights are triggered and displays in the wall show images or videos and audio tracks are played.
All the control code for this part of the exhibit is ruby. I wrote C interfaces with ruby wrappers to communicate with the floor sensors and the lighting controllers. The system queries a MYSQL database for the media files to be displayed and then tells computers in the walls to play the media via UDP.
It's the most reliable part of the entire exhibit.
Ruby was used for the other major part of the exhibit, the Wall though I didn't have much to do with that. Most of the graphics were prototyped in ruby using interfaces to OpenGL, a bit of Cocoa and a physics library before being ported to pure Obj-C.
Puppet and Chef: DevOps
I didn't see a mention of Puppet or Chef in the 30 answers that preceded my arrival. Ruby appears to dominate current work in cloud automation and is the base, extension, and templating language of these two big players. They are used primarily to distribute system and application configuration information for server arrays and for general IT workstation management.
The DevOps field is quite Ruby-aware. Today, Perl has a competitor. While a really simple script may often still be written directly for sh(1), a complex task now might be done in Ruby rather than Perl.
The only site I've done with Ruby at work is using Rails, but I'd like to try Merb.
Other than that I do a lot of little utility programs in Ruby - for instance an app that reads RSS feeds and imports new posts into a dabase.
It's fun, so I also write some dumb stuff just because it's so quick. Yesterday I wrote an app to play the Monty Hall problem 100,000 times to help a friend convince her professor that switching is the correct strategy.
I almost take insult that ruby is a rails thing. It is like back when CGI was the latest trend and everyone figured that if you knew perl you must be doing it only because you programmed CGI apps. Ruby is just a scripting language for me, although not as mature as python so I somewhat regret having to jump through some of its hoops and recent changes, I still like it and use it. Although I work in a java shop and therefore groovy is the ideal choice for a scripting language, I still use ruby at home and for throw away scripts that aren't needed to be shared at work.
I was considering getting into RoR from all the buzz and how quick/simple it is, but after looking over rails I didn't see anything at all that was amazing or even the least bit innovative or rapidly fast about its development compared to any other framework. The only benefit I saw was that I could code in ruby, which would be nice, but initial setup, server maintenance and scaling is more difficult, thus re-offsetting the pleasure of coding in ruby.
I created a presentation -- coincidentally named Off The Rails -- to discuss Rack-based web applications:
https://github.com/alexch/Off-The-Rails
The git repo includes slides in Markdown format and sample code (in the form of running applications and middleware). Here's the abstract:
Ruby on Rails is the most popular web application framework for Ruby. But it's not the only one! If you think Rails is too big, or too opinionated, or too anything, you might be happy to learn about the new generation of so-called microframeworks built on Rack. And since Rails 3 is itself a Rack app, you don't have to give up Rails to get the benefit of Sinatra routes or Grape APIs.
And here are some references:
This talk lives at https://github.com/alexch/off-the-rails
Yehuda's #10 Favorite Thing About Ruby
Rack
rack-test
rack-client
Sinatra
Grape
Vegas
Siesta
Rerun
Hope you find it useful!
I'm mostly a Web developer, and I learned Ruby to use Rails, but I like the language so much that I started developing a desktop Swing application in Ruby, using JRuby and Monkeybars. I'm competent in Java, but don't much like using it, and the Swing API is horrible, so putting Ruby on top has been a big win.
We mainly use rails, but we have plenty of other non-rails ruby things - for example a standalone authentication daemon thing for centralized authentication of users, and an 'image processing server' which runs arbitrary numbers of ruby processes to process images in parallel.
Oh, and don't forget good old Rake :-)
Ruby is also used for Desktop application. Especially the use of JRuby to develop Swing desktop application.
I've used Ruby at work for
A data extractor, generating csv files from binary output.
A .ini file generator, turning a simple syntax into a repetitive .ini format.
A simple TCP/IP server, acting as stand-in for the customer's system during testing.
We use Ruby to implement our test automation software. This includes test framework and driver code for Selenium RC, WATIR and AutoIT.
Ruby is powerful enough to create comprehensive applications that can interface with Test tools like Selenium or WATIR, while at the same time reading from data files, interacting with a remote Windows UI and performing near transparent network communication. All while running on Windows or Linux.
The uncluttered syntax makes it ideal for new and inexperienced programmers to read. While its totally OO nature makes it easy for these same programmers to apply good (recently learned) OO techniques, from the start.
The flexible nature of Ruby's syntax also makes the use and creation of DSLs much easier. This allows less-technical people to get invovled, read and possibly create there own tests.
I have used Ruby for code generation of C# and T-SQL stored procedures in a project with unstable requirements. The data model was encoded in a YAML file and .erb templates were used for the classes and stored procedures. It also allowed for a much more DRY solution than would have been possible with straight C# as repetitve code could be factored out into a single method in the code generator.
Where I work, we use Ruby to do a number of different one-off type batch jobs. One example of that is a job that interacts with Amazon's S3 service. At the time, the Ruby S3 library was probably the easiest one out there for us to get up and running in a short amount of time.
I wrote an order processing expert system (see DSL answer as well), converted 100k lines of customer specific perl into about 10k lines of ruby handling dozens of customers. No web components at all, no Rails.
I am a webdriver user. ruby is used by webdriver for automating the build process thanks to rake. see http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/ for details
Heh, great question.
I used Ruby to convert Excel spreadsheet airport facility data to sqlite3 for the android phone platform while making an app for pilots.
I use Ruby with Sinatra which is much simpler than Rails. I did use Rails but just found that it has turned into a bit of a monster, although Rails is still amazing compared to web frameworks available for Java.
The main feature of Ruby that I love however is "eval" and "method_missing", which Rails actually uses for example in ActiveRecord so that you can use the amazing "find_by-field-name-" queries.
I used Ruby for a lot of back-end code simply because I was the only person who was tasked to do it and needed a nice clean language that allowed me to be very productive and write easy to maintain code. I find Ruby allows me to do that easier than Perl and Python. Other people's mileage might vary on that but it works well for me.
Besides that, I like how Sequel and Nokogiri work. I also used ActiveRecord for a while separately from Rails.
We use some Ruby for file manipulation but have not been able to incorporate rails yet.
I've used Ruby a lot professionally for quick scripts for things like shuffling files around. I'm the same way in that I was using Ruby first before touching Rails at all.
In Boulder there was an excellent group of Ruby users who met monthly. This point was made - that Ruby does have an existence beside its use in Rails. Plain Ruby users do exist, are begging for attention, have neat things to show, and can find each other at user group meetings.
They also had better pizza than the Python group, who met also the same day of the month. Can only pick one...
While we do have several Rails apps at work, we also use Ruby for some fairly intensive non-web stuff.
We've got an SMS delivery daemon, which pulls messages from a queue and then delivers them, and credit card processing daemon which other apps can call out to, which makes sure there's a central audit trail.