Install now with sudo gem install classroom

ClassRoom (RubyForge project) is a project to develop a distributed ‘class server’ powered by DRb that I have been working on. Let’s skip long explanations and jump into code. First, we’ll create a very basic “Dog” class with some basic features:

class Dog
attr_accessor :name

def self.count
@@count ||= 0
end

def initialize(options)
self.name = options[:name]
@@count ||= 0
@@count += 1
end
end

Next, we’ll create a program that can use Dog via ClassRoom:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘classroom’

class_server = ClassRoom::Client.new(‘classroom://:2001′)
class_server.add_class(IO.read(‘dog.rb’))
class_server.load_class(:all)

puts "There are #{Dog.count} dogs"
fido = Dog.new(:name => "Fido")
puts "There are #{Dog.count} dogs"
rufus = Dog.new(:name => "Rufus")
puts "There are #{Dog.count} dogs"
puts "fido’s name is #{fido.name}"

# => There are 0 dogs
# => There are 1 dogs
# => There are 2 dogs
# => fido’s name is Fido

Take care to notice that at no point is dog.rb actually included/’require’d. Read More

Ruby legend whytheluckystuff has developed a new HTML parser called Hpricot. It’s easy to install and use and parses HTML in a liberal fashion. It does, however, require a compiler to install (as it’s written in C), so should be okay on Linux and Mac OS X, though not necessarily on Windows (yet).

Here’s some demo code:

require ‘hpricot’
doc = Hpricot.parse("index.html")
(doc/:p/:a).each do |link|
p link.attributes
end

This is a good alternative to RubyfulSoup, if you’re finding RubyfulSoup too slow (though RubyfulSoup is certainly worth a try!) Read More