RubyOSA
RubyConf 2006 had a lot of interesting new ideas for Ruby. There is a nice summary of the main points here on the InfoQ website. One feature that actually caught my eye was how Apple was taking part in RubyOSA.
"RubyAEOSA is a Ruby wrapper for Apple events, that was started in 2001, but not active since 2003. The code required is unnecesarrily verbose. Instead, you could wrap and execute with AppleScript, but it's slower and limited by knowledge of AppleScript.
RubyOSA is a new project created by Apple, intended to be a successor to RubyAEOSA, under active development and used today. It has a much more Rubyish API, generating Ruby code on the fly and sending events lazily. Apple events are completely hidden."
This is an interesting thing for me because I have always wanted to interact more with the applications on OS X but I really do not like the syntax of AppleScript nor the tools that are provided to support it.
A side effect of this is the realization that Apple and other companies such as Sun and Microsoft have actually taken a very strong interest in the Ruby community. Java 6.0 is supposed to have scripting support built-in. However, seeing how the Mac version of Java always lacks behind its other counterparts, we probably will not be using much of this yet.
All the more why I should really try to do some research in this language. Since the idea of refactoring for Ruby is partially take by the RDT team, I might consider doing something in metaprogramming refactoring. That seems like a new field and should be interesting to venture into.
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