AndyObtiva

The talk video and slides have been posted for the Montreal.rb March 2024 talk "Frontend Ruby with Glimmer DSL for Web" (Ruby in the Browser Web Frontend Framework).

I am giving Montreal.rb talk "Frontend Ruby with Glimmer DSL for Web" on Mar 6 2024. This is the most exciting Ruby topic in 2024 for doubling productivity and halving cost/time in developing/maintaining Rails Frontends compared to using inferior JS technologies like React, Angular, Vue, etc... I believe this will be the most important Ruby investment in 2024. Anyone who ignores it will be stuck in the Ice Age of Frontend Development, like riding horse carriage compared to a Ferrari.

Recently, I was interviewed for the 2024 Ruby Dev Summit, and a video podcast of the interview was just posted online and is available to watch for free for the next 24 hours (Fri, Feb 16 3pm ET till Sat, Feb 17 3pm ET). Also, an audio podcast was published in the Ruby Rogues podcast.

The video of the Jan 2024 Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup A.I. talk "Building an AI Medical Scribe in Ruby" by Jean-Sebastien Boulanger (CTO of Circle Medical) has been posted. Description: "In this talk, I'll share insights from our experience creating an AI medical scribe using Ruby at Circle Medical, a hybrid primary care provider seeing over 50,000 patients monthly. We leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a scribe to enhance clinical documentation and save doctors' time."

Glimmer DSL for Web (Ruby in the Browser Web Frontend Framework)

Last September, I gave a talk titled "Intro To Ruby in the Browser" about how to use Ruby for Frontend Development in Rails as a complete replacement for JS as per Matz's RubyConf 2022 Keynote Speech. I concluded the talk by mentioning a new project, Glimmer DSL for Web, that would make Ruby in the Browser the simplest, most intuitive, and most productive Software Engineering experience in Frontend Development. Well, The future is now! Glimmer DSL for Web just had its 0.2.2 Beta Release!

Video of Dec 2023 Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup A.I. talk "Building LLM-powered Applications" by Andrei Bondarev (Solutions Architect / Owner at Source Labs) is posted. The 2023 breakthroughs in Generative AI took the software development world by storm. We'll take a look at a few components of what is quickly becoming the modern stack for building LLM powered applications. Andrei will build a case for Ruby in the emerging AI trend, and show how some of the AI capabilities can be leveraged today!

The video and slides for the Nov 2023 Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup talk "Anatomy of a Payment" by Michel Jamati (CTO/Co-Founder of Lexop) have been posted!! This talk will provide an overview of the business payment world. Ruby on Rails examples will be demonstrated along the way to illustrate various types of payments that can be made with different payment processors.

Graphs and Charts 0.2.x adds a new Bar Chart Custom Control for Glimmer DSL for LibUI (Prerequisite-Free Ruby Desktop Development Cross-Platform Native GUI Library).

Glimmer DSL for SWT 4.30.0.0 (JRuby Desktop Development Cross-Platform Native GUI Framework) is the quarterly major release that supports a new version of Eclipse SWT (version 4.30, released in December 2023).

Glimmer DSL for WX - Ruby Desktop Development GUI Library for the wxWidgets GUI toolkit and wxruby3 binding

Graphs and Charts (Glimmer DSL for LibUI Custom Controls)

Graphs and Charts is a new library for Gimmer DSL for LibUI that aims at providing Custom Controls for rendering graphs and charts. In version 0.1.1, it supports Line Graph in a new `line_graph` Custom Control for rendering lines (1 or more) connecting points with different y-axis values along a time-based x-axis.

Slides & Code for RubyConf 2023 Workshop "How To Build Desktop Applications in Ruby"
Thanks to everyone who attended my RubyConf 2023 2-Hour Workshop "How To Build Desktop Applications in Ruby". For those who missed the event, I posted the presentation slides and code exercises (27 exercises) on GitHub. I also blogged about the new Color The Circles game app that was developed at the RubyConf 2023 Community Day Glimmer Desktop Hacking event.

Glimmer DSL for LibUI 0.10.1 & 0.10.0 ship with support for building/scaffolding Area Canvas Graphics Custom Shapes (with optional Gemification), which represent higher-order graphical concepts that could be formed out of more rudimentary shapes to simplify interaction with them as coarse-grained components in a desktop app. They improve productivity significantly in graphical apps that rely on Area Canvas Graphics, like UML Diagramming tools, Traffic Control Signalling apps, and games.

Glimmer DSL for LibUI Scaffolding + Snake Game
Glimmer DSL for LibUI 0.9.x versions include support for the Glimmer Command, Application Scaffolding, Custom Component Scaffolding, Custom Component Gem Scaffolding, and more. Glimmer Scaffolding features could be thought of as the "Desktop Application" equivalent of Rails Scaffolding and Generators. In fact, I ate my own dog food and used the new Application Scaffolding feature to effortlessly scaffold a Glimmer Snake game.

Glimmer Wordle 1.1.5 has just been released with official support for Windows. Although the game worked on Windows before, thanks to the platform-independent Glimmer DSL for SWT GUI library it was built with, styling was not tweaked for Windows till now in version 1.1.5.

My RubyConf 2023 workshop submission titled "How To Build Desktop Applications in Ruby" has been accepted! It will take place in San Diego, California, USA on Monday, November 13, 2023 at 10am PT. Workshop seating is limited, so please RSVP for your spot over here: https://rubyconf-2023.sessionize.com/session/531448

Glimmer DSL for SWT (JRuby Desktop Development Cross-Platform Native GUI Framework) version 4.29.0.0 has just been released! It is the quarterly release the happens when a new version of the Eclipse SWT GUI toolkit is released (SWT 4.29 was released in September of 2023).

Matz mentioned in his RubyConf 2022 keynote speech that in the future of Ruby, maybe we could start replacing JavaScript with Ruby in the browser...

Tutorial: Ruby GUI with Glimmer (by Mattias Velamsson)

Mattias Velamsson recently shared a beginner's tutorial for making a GUI (Graphical User Interface) in Ruby titled "Ruby GUI with Glimmer". It provides a step-by-step code walkthrough that produces a full-fledged web-API-driven table-based business application. It uses various gems and APIs like glimmer-dsl-libui, dotenv, Net::HTTP, URI, JSON, and the Exchange Rates Data API.

The video for the Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup April 3, 2023 talk "Rails Already Supports View Components!" has been posted! This talk will explain the various ways Rails already supports view components out of the box.

https://andymaleh.blogspot.com/2023/08/montrealrb-apr-2023-rails-already.html

Every self respecting Senior Software Engineer out there should build their own code editor, even if just as a toy app to later be discarded in favor of another code editor. And, if they are Rubyists, they should build their code editor in Ruby. If you think of yourself as a Ruby Senior Software Engineer, but cannot build your own code editor in Ruby, there are serious holes in your skillset!! Explore Glimmer for many Ruby options to help you start the code editor building challenge and journey.

Glimmer DSL for SWT 4.28.0.0 (JRuby Desktop Development Cross-Platform Native GUI Framework) is the quarterly major release that happens after a new version of Eclipse SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) is released. It is wrapping SWT 4.28, which was released on June 5, 2023.

Glimmer DSL for LibUI 0.0.8 has been released with a new feature called Composite Shape (already in Glimmer DSL for SWT), which enables building new visual concepts by aggregating multiple smaller shapes within a parent composite shape using relative positioning and inherited `fill`/`stroke` colors.

The video and slides for the Montreal.rb July 2023 talk "Import Spreadsheets in Ruby on Rails with Flatfile.com" have been posted.

Glimmer gets a new GUI DSL in 2023 called Glimmer DSL for WX (Early Alpha 0.0.5 was built in 1 day) to support the very mature wxWidgets GUI toolkit that renders cross-platform native GUI controls using a brand new wxruby3 binding!

A new Glimmer FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section has been added to the Glimmer project README on GitHub in order to answer questions like "How do Glimmer GUI DSLs compare to Shoes?" and "What is the difference between Glimmer and Glimmer DSL for SWT?", among others.

The video for the Montreal.rb (Ruby/Rails Meetup) May 2023 talk "Integrating REST APIs with Microsoft Kiota" has been posted! Microsoft Kiota is an open-source technology that can automatically generate SDKs for HTTP REST APIs in Ruby (or any programming language) to save software engineers from having to write error prone API client code that handles authentication, authorization, serialization, and exception handling manually.

In the 0.7.x version series, Glimmer DSL for LibUI finally gets the much awaited Table Selection API and Table Sorting API that got added to the underlying libui C library a few months ago. The good news is tables are now sortable from their data by default without having to write a single line of code (Convention Over Configuration). That means all older applications that had tables now have sortable tables.