[LRUG] Tonight's meeting

[Daniel Barlow]

Murray Steele wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We're a speaker down for this evening as Julian Burgess is unable to
> make it into London due to the snow.  We'll reschedule his talk for
> some time later in the year.  Anyone feel up to filling his shoes?
> Obviously at this point anything goes and we'll be hugely grateful to
> anyone who steps up, no matter how underprepared they feel.

Not a talk as such, but an idea I had the other day: I'm learning Ruby 
at the moment primarily using the v2 Pickaxe, plus reading this list and 
comp.lang.ruby.  While I don't anticipate the language itself has 
changed so much since the Pickaxe came out, I do recognise that the 
libraries/gems/what-have-you have moved on, to the extent that some 
libraries it recommends have effectively been superseded.

For example, anyone asking questions about REXML is (in my observation, 
at least) likely to be met with "have you tried Nokogiri instead", and 
likewise anyone starting their project in Webrick users will (I think) 
quite likely be pointed at Mongrel.  Question for the meeting (or for 
the list, if you prefer, or both) - what other parts of the pickaxe have 
suffered the same fate?  SOAP?  Erb?  Calling native code?   Perhaps we 
could create a list.

Yes, Test::Unit -> Rspec is one contender, though I'm not sure that's 
established quite universally, yet.

I'm asking because I want the answers, not because I know them - over to 
you...


-dan