This Week's New Releases

RubyWeekend Programming Contest June 26-28

This weekend is the RubyWeekend programming contest. The objective of this contest is to program a game in Ruby with the theme of "A Tiny World" and submit it within the time limits. Entries will then be judged and a winner announced.

These type of game programming contests are quite popular in the PyGame scene, and now they've come to the Ruby programming scene. Ruby is the key here, so all entries must be coded in Ruby. You also might think that it's unrealistic to expect someone to program a game in 2 or 3 days. However, it's not quite that unrealistic. The games are rarely polished, and are more like tech demos or alphas of finished games. No one is expecting polish, just a functional game with a solid concept relating to "A Tiny World."

Flog 2.1.2

Flog is a tool to tell you how tortured your code is. It's another of the emerging projects using Ruby parsing libraries to parse Ruby code. In a nutshell, Flog will give your code a score based on how much work is being done per line of code. Convoluted, compressed, busy and messy code will get higher scores. Clean code with simple statements on each line will get lower scores.

There's also some debate whether lower scores are even good. Though scores that are too high may signify that your code is too Perl-like, reasonably high scores may not necessarily be a bad thing.

ImageScience 1.2.0

ImageScience is a small library for resizing images. This is extremely useful for making thumbnail images in just about any web application that has attachments for image uploads. So what makes this so different than using RMagick?

RMagic (and ImageMagick itself) is huge. It's a low-level C API wrapped up with Ruby. It does tons of things, including image resizing but also including drawing, composing, color correction, and many other types of image manipulation. It's notorious for memory leaks and is a lot more than you actually need if all you want to do is resize an image. ImageScience, on the other hand, is a very small native library for resizing images wrapped in a small Ruby wrapper. That's it. Simple, small, gets the job done.