Week ahead: Ruby/Rails conference and next paper?

It should be a stimulating week ahead as the clocks spring forward (why not two weeks ago?) and I check the schedule for Scotland on Rails and plan the sessions to attend. Now with a new Eee PC I should also have something to write on and connectivity.

Yesterday jQuery in Action arrived. I've started to read it and am finding already that the two CSS books that were until recently just sitting on the shelf are helping me to grasp what jQuery is about. One of those titles - Keith or Cederholm - highlighted that learning CSS helps you to understand and learn other languages and this really does seem to be the case. jQuery in Action will definitely be travelling to Edinburgh. Even though I'm only at chapter 2 it's a good read. There's a Selector Lab a web page to enter jQuery selector strings and see how the code relates to the DOM (document object model).

Over the past week I've been investigating Ruby graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits - specifically Tk (must check version 8.5). Just as with Drupal and settling on a theme, eventually - it seems? - I will have to choose a GUI. For now it's a case of seeing what they offer and how to run them within Eclipse (and without). The jQuery book will help push me with Drupal and enliven what will be essentially be static (archive) content:

• Archive - Brian's original notes; my introduction
• Biographies - Brian, myself - and who knows other contributors
• Chronology
• - still thinking about other content
• old - e.g. the informatics pages
• and new - a h2cm collaborative book.

There is no word as yet about the socio-technical chapter submitted in the new year, which may be good news? Although there's enough going on above, I like to have a paper on slow cook. So, we will see what arises on mapping, concept organisation ... in health care, communication and education. As a starter (c/o free access to SAGE journals) there are several papers on intervention mapping within public health and health promotion that will be essential reading. Another ingredient to (potentially) add to the mix - I've long wondered about case formulation within psychological therapies and Hodges' model. Time to make a start, but real slow like...

Drupal, Eclipse and Ruby - GUIs?

It was a long day yesterday. The wind (outside) woke me at 0500 so that was that. After collecting the recycling bins and the contents I set to work.

Last Thursday I attended the NW England Drupal meeting again, a great way to find inspiration and lessons on how to 'best proceed'. There is a training event organised for next month by Chris and James of menus & blocks, but being mid-week I can't make it (even with funds). After the meeting I started the server again and loaded the Drupal sites versions 5.2 and 6.0. The last time with 6.0 there was a problem with modules and memory limits. This is now resolved and tomorrow I'll explore some more. jQuery in Action should arrive this week. I should follow-up on the kind offer of free hosting by Chris Ward from last December.

Although missing the Drupal training event, I have managed to book for two days for Scotland On Rails. I'm really looking forward to this as already mentioned here.

Over the weekend Eclipse and Ruby have been a pre-occupation, especially GUI support for windows, buttons and graphical widgets. Before things go awry I watched a screencast on debugging in Eclipse and proving that this (basically!) works on my set-up and with require 'tk' in place I've run through several Tk tutorials and started to explore just what the GUI toolkits have to offer.

The experimentation in the Ruby GUI space continues. There are many old style bindings to GUI toolkits such as Qt or GTK, or embedded DSLs or APIs based on JRuby such as these three new ways of building GUIs with Swing. These libraries use different approaches for building and arranging GUI components.

Ruby Shoes is a GUI toolkit with a slightly different focus. Ruby Shoes is a creation of Why The Lucky Stiff, author of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and prolific programmer of libraries such as HPricot (HTML Parser), the web framework Camping and many others. Why's toolkit Ruby Shoes, is a GUI toolkit built on GTK technologies Cairo (drawing) and Pango (for text). The number of GUI controls it supports is limited by design, and the ones that do exist use OS GUI specific components. Currently MacOS X, Windows and GTK versions are available.

The entry goes on to describe the influences behind Shoes that includes Processing - 'an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.'