Ronin 0.9.4 released

[Gus Prevas]

Hi all,

Version 0.9.4 of the Ronin web framework has been released.

This version provides compatibility with version 0.9 of Gosu, and transitions from the Ivy dependency system to a pom.xml-based setup.  Please visit http://ronin-web.org for instructions on how to get up and running with Ronin.

If you have existing Ronin apps, I'd recommend following the quick-install instructions on http://ronin-web.org to create a new app which follows the new dependency structure, then migrating your controller and view classes over by hand.  There haven't been any major API changes since the last release, so with any luck all your actual code can be ported over intact.

Please direct any Ronin-related questions to ronin...@googlegroups.com.  General Gosu questions should go to gosu...@googlegroups.com

-Gus

[Carson Gross]

Hey All,

I've put together a screencast on how to get started with Ronin here:

  https://vimeo.com/37143126

I apologize in advance, the audio is pretty terrible, but it will show you how to get started doing Ronin development.

Cheers,
Carson

[Peter Rexer]

I am in awe to you guys.   This is 10x more amazing than I could have dreamt of a year ago.  

Completely cursing awesome.  

-Peter

[Carson Gross]

Thanks Peter, we are all pretty psyched.

Now we just need to figure out how to get the hacker news crowd to notice... :)

Cheers,
Carson

[Mengu]

as a HN reader, we are not going to notice unless you post the news
there. :)

On Feb 23, 4:46 am, Carson Gross <carsongr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Peter, we are all pretty psyched.
>
> Now we just need to figure out how to get the hacker news crowd to
> notice... :)
>
> Cheers,
> Carson
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Peter Rexer <pre...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> > I am in awe to you guys.   This is 10x more amazing than I could have
> > dreamt of a year ago.
>
> > Completely cursing awesome.
>
> > -Peter
>

> > On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Carson Gross <carsongr...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >> Hey All,
>
> >> I've put together a screencast on how to get started with Ronin here:
>
> >>  https://vimeo.com/37143126
>
> >> I apologize in advance, the audio is pretty terrible, but it will show
> >> you how to get started doing Ronin development.
>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Carson
>

> >> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Gus Prevas <kpre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> Hi all,
>
> >>> Version 0.9.4 of the Ronin web framework has been released.
>
> >>> This version provides compatibility with version 0.9 of Gosu, and
> >>> transitions from the Ivy dependency system to a pom.xml-based setup.

> >>>  Please visithttp://ronin-web.orgfor instructions on how to get up

> >>> and running with Ronin.
>
> >>> If you have existing Ronin apps, I'd recommend following the

> >>> quick-install instructions onhttp://ronin-web.orgto create a new app

[Carson Gross]

I'm afraid that, although we've got a pretty good little programming language and IDE (and web framework) but I have to admit I don't really know how to evangelize the language.  I tried putting up articles on reddit and they were quickly downvoted.  Alan put one up on Hacker News, but it didn't make it off the new page.

Looking around at other languages that have become successful, the obvious example I see is ruby, which got popular due to Rails.  That's why I'm putting a lot of effort into Ronin and Tosa.

I'm also working on getting Ronin deploying on Heroku, in hopes that cool-by-association works.

Anyone have any suggestions out there?  Especially the non-GW people on this list?

The good news is that we have time: Gosu isn't going anywhere due to Guidewire using it coupled with Guidewire's continuing success. But that's another story that never makes Hacker News. ;)

Cheers,
Carson

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[Peter Rexer]

Your how-to vid is actually a good start, and one that I think should get posted to HN.  

Then a how-to for Heroku blog entry would be a great follow-on.   

As for getting up-voted on HN, we need a YCombinator person to like it.  They have a lot of pull there.  I think reaching out to some of them and asking if they'd link to your howto, or Alan's posts, in return for some links to their blogs, would be a good way to get some uptick in traffic.  

It's also totally fair to re-post some of the older blog entries, or post new links to them from fresh articles that explain some of the kick-ass language features.  

Gosu basically needs a bunch more cross-linked exposure to gain some traction.   More how-to get started vids.   Maybe one that mirrors the famous how-to for RoR to make a blog in 10 minutes.   Then get YC guys, and anyone else that has a decent twitter following to re-tweet the HN post, the blog, etc.   Get the DrDobbs folks to re-up their coverage of Gosu...

I've got a dozen other ideas.  Many of them would take actually concentrating on making the marketing happen.  Is Guidewire willing to invest in some marketing for Gosu?  

-Peter

[carlosqt]

What is that that differentiate Gosu from other 'similar' languages
and that makes Gosu unique? Is it the "Extensible type system (inject
types into the type system)"? it will be easier to promote Gosu by
differentiate it from other languages and elaborate on that (videos,
tutorials, examples, more blog posts, etc.)

I find the comparison table nice ( http://gosu-lang.org/compare.html )
but will be better if you add Fantom ( http://fantom.org/ ) to the
list and probably emerging languages such as Ceylon, Kotlin and
(maybe) Xtend. Then add something like

Production Ready Gosu yes all others yes except Ceylon, Kotlin
<-- I find this important
Functional Programming Scala and Clojure yes all others No... right?

What about:
Multi Target Runtime - X language compiles to: JVM bytecode, CLR IL,
JavaScript - Clojure and Fantom do the 3 of them. Kotlin and Ceylon
bytecode and javascript.

I think that Functional Programming and Multi Target Runtime are
giving good marketing to other languages nowadays.

Voilà just an idea.

> > > >>>  Please visithttp://ronin-web.orgforinstructions on how to get up

> > > >>> and running with Ronin.
>
> > > >>> If you have existing Ronin apps, I'd recommend following the

> > > >>> quick-install instructions onhttp://ronin-web.orgtocreate a new app

[khaled yousfi]

    var a: String[] = null
    print(a.length) //prints 0 !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Alan Keefer]

You must be running Gosu within a Guidewire product, rather than the
community release version.

Long ago, back in the mists of time, we had made the decision that in
Gosu (then called GScript), all property accesses should be null-safe,
such that x.Y.Z would return "null" if x or x.Y evaluated to null.
It's often convenient, but we eventually decided that it really wasn't
a good idea to do that in all cases, since it can easily mask bugs.
By that point, though, we couldn't change that in Guidewire's code,
since it would blow up customer code pretty severely, so instead left
the behavior in the Guidewire version of Gosu, while in Gosu CR we
don't do that. In community release (i.e. "open source", though the
source isn't yet published) Gosu, you have to explicitly use the ?.
operator to do null-safe property accesses. So your code throws an
NPE if you try it with the latest Gosu CR release, but will print 0 if
you use a?.length. ?. works for method calls as well. That's one of
a few things that we've effectively tightened-up in Gosu CR relative
to Guidewire Gosu. There are a lot of implicit coercions that we
disallow in Gosu CR, and as of the latest 0.9 build (0.9-12 is what we
just released, I believe), Gosu CR is now case-sensitive (at long
last), another historical decision that we've been working for years
to reverse, but can't easily do in Guidewire products without breaking
backwards compatibility.

Explicit-safe property access or method calls will, for primitives,
return 0 for ints and false for booleans, and null for object types.
The "implicit" null-safe property paths in Guidewire Gosu behave
slightly differently with regard to primitives for the sake of sanity
(especially around arithmetic and comparison operators).

-Alan

[Scott McKinney]

@carlosqt

Thanks for you thoughtful comments. Your question prompted me to
write this:

http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/what-differentiates-gosu-from-other-languages/

Hope it helps.

Scott

[Carlos Quintanilla]

Excellent,

Very informative. I will tweet your post.

By the way, I would like to add another suggestion that I consider very important to promote a programming language. 

Write a Book - Gosu in Action, Learning Gosu, Programming Gosu, Advance Gosu. 

It can even be a MEAP (see http://manning.com) so you can month by month release new chapters as the language improves. I will definitively buy it. Look at the number of books other languages have. People (programmers) like buying books and reading about programming if not why are there so many books hehe.

In a book you can have a dedicated Chapter on each Gosu feature: 

Introduction: The basics, the language, building programs, 

Real World Apps:  GUI apps, Web Apps with Ronin, Working with XML.

Advance: FP features, Open Type System, etc.

That's something I have always complained about Delphi Prism (Oxygene | Embarcadero Prism) there are no books, to learn the language you need to use limited wikipages or buy the software and try out yourself.

Just something to think about... maybe it should be considered when there is a Gosu 1.0 version.

Regards

Carlos

2012/2/28 Scott McKinney <rsmck...@hotmail.com>