Ruby

The company lays out its platform-as-a-service plans in hopes of appealing to next-generation app developers.

RubyMine 3.0 development environment supports the latest versions of the Ruby and Ruby on Rails Web frameworks

Improvements offered in debugging, memory usage, and performance.

The world of IT is embarking, I suspect, on a another period of language creation hype. This time, the hype epicenter is Ruby and the facilities it provides to create custom languages.

According to an Evans Data survey, use of Ruby has jumped 40 percent since last year.

For the Ruby language to avoid the same ill fate as Smalltalk, developers must use test-driven development to keep code clean, an industry executive stressed Wednesday evening at the RailsConf 2009 event in Las Vegas.

Spend enough time around technology and it becomes a part of you. You began to identify with it, even develop a belief system around it. You may have attended regular meetings of others similarly afflicted, and openly despised members of other groups. Before you were even aware of it, you'd joined a cult.

Heroku will debut on Friday its cloud service for Ruby applications, competing with Google and offering provisionless Web hosting.

In separate developments, Microsoft Windows platform developers and Ruby application builders both should gain functionality improvements with efforts afoot at Microsoft and the OMG (Object Management Group).