Ruby is a powerful, high-level programming language that’s well suited for a variety of tasks. It’s easy to read, easy to write, and it can make getting things done fast and painless. And Ruby really shines when it comes to scripting tidy little solutions to difficult problems.

RAZR phones from Motorola have been quite popular for a while in America. And it was the iPhone that managed to steal that top spot lately. Is that the reason for which the RAZR3 Ruby got canceled? The phone was supposed to arrive sometime in Q1 2009 but that won't happen now. I hope Motorola is finally ready to move on and try to develop a new hit phone soon.

Ruby on Rails is garnering a lot of praise as an easy-to-use, database-driven Web framework for developing Web applications. Most of the documentation for Ruby on Rails centers on Macintosh, with the remainder seemingly only for Windows machines, but RoR is perfectly usable on Linux computers too. This article explains how to install and begin developing with RoR in Linux.

Henri Sivonen has posted an exprimental Gecko build that parses HTML 5:

The level of quality is “It runs and some pages render!” This build is not at all suitable for normal browsing use. Please don’t use it with your usual Firefox profile. There are numerous known issues starting with bogus memory management (leaking everything in the parser!), lack of fragment parsing support, lack of quirks mode, HTML elements being represented as DOM nodes that behave like XHTML elements and the integration with CSS layout being inefficient. The baseline Gecko source isn’t synced with the trunk, so the other parts of Gecko don’t have all the latest patches. The parser doesn’t reflect the most recent spec changes. meta element-based encoding declarations and BOM sniffing don’t work.

If a page doesn’t render, try reloading or navigating back and forth.

For background, please refer to a recent
newsgroup posting of mine. (Summary: The parser core is mechanically translated from the Validator.nu HTML Parser.)

Sam Ruby talked a little about the implementation:

He starts from a single source, in Java. The Java code can be compiled to Java byte codes, JavaScript source, or C++ presumably making use of Mozilla libraries for things such as memory management. If he can do that, it seems to me to be a rather small leap from there to producing C++ using, say, either Ruby or Python libraries for memory management, as well as a thin binding to the language. C# would also be a reasonable target.

If this could be done, and made available under a liberal license, it could go a long way towards making available consistent and performant implementations of the HTML5 parser algorithm everywhere.

Make sure to look at the latest job listing on CrunchBoard. While doing that take a look at our new Crunchboard Service and Sales Directories. They are a great way to connect with the start-up community. Here’s some of jobs posted in the past week:

• User Interface Engineer
  Facebook - Palo Alto, CA
• Product Design
  Facebook - Palo Alto, CA
• Killer Interactive Developer
  Crispin Porter + Bogusky - Boulder, CO or Miami, FL
• Web Project Manager
  FOX News Channel - New York, NY
• Superstar Rails Developer
  Cerego - Tokyo, Japan
• Senior Java/Flash/Flex Programmer
  RoboDynamics - Santa Monica, CA

TechCrunch is also still looking for a Ruby Developer to work on CrunchBase, as well as a fulltime writer to work on TechCrunchIT at our office in Atherton, CA.

International readers are encouraged to visit the British and French job boards as well.

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