Jay McGavren, Phoenix Ruby Programmer Extraordinaire and all around good guy, has developed a super cool game library in Ruby called Zyps. This screencast demonstrates the following: * set up an Environment * place Creatures in the Environment * create Behaviors and add them to Creatures * create Actions for Behaviors to initiate * limit when Behaviors occur with Conditions * add EnvironmentalFactors such as wind "sudo gem install zyps" to install, or visit: http://jay.mcgavren.com/zyps By jaymcgavren If you run into problems viewing this screencast, you can access an MP4 version at http://rubyology.com/mp3s/zyps_screencast.mp4

Hey code monkeys! I built a proof-of-concept site for a RESTful service registry that is actually a RESTful API API. It's called www.ServiceReg.com and the site (which also functions as an API) allows developers to register RESTful Web services that can be used as a simple URL (including the POST, PUT, and DELETE verb-based queries). These simple URLs can be used in application, mashups, or even directly from the browser's address bar.

Hey code monkeys! Marc Chung from OpenRain.com gave a funtabulous presentation at this week's AZ on Rails user group meeting on deploying rails applications on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and also demonstrated chaining tasks together in the cloud to work on a common goal (like calculating pi) using MPI (Message Passing Interface Standard). This is a MUST hear discussion. Thanks to Derek Neighbors for putting together show notes and thanks to Marc for sharing his experience with all of us :) http://derekneighbors.com/2008/2/20/phoenix-rails-february

Welcome back! Today we cover upcoming conference updates. Ruby 1.9 update. Heroku introduction. Wuby vs. Thin - Wuby Wins! Enterprise SOA discussion REST vs. SOAP - REST Wins! Interview with Theo Beack, Deputy CTO BEA - Ruby involved in their virtualization container strategies - more to come. Great Amazon service and twitter links below: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.amazonwebservices.com%2Fconnect%2Fentry.jspa%3FexternalID%3D1182%26ref%3Dfeatured http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdominiek.com%2Farticles%2F2008%2F2%2F15%2Fhow-to-build-a-twitter-agent My post on posting twitter tweets with 10 lines of Ruby code: http://blog.kineticweb.com/articles/2008/02/16/capistrano-twitter-task-take-2

Check out my presentation at the Phoenix Rails User Group meeting on S5 and P8. Both are interesting technologies for presentations.

ActiveResource allows you to interact with a RESTful database in the sky. Think about it for a moment... Rails 1.2 and 2.0 provide RESTful services automatically through scaffolding. Active Resource provides access to these RESTful database interfaces automatically! It's amazing!

This screencast is a continuation of the episode 54 but we will be applying a web design to a Wuby application. Watch this - it's even easier than Rails!

A Rubyology listener wrote in asking about quick ways to add web templates to Ruby on Rails sites. This screen casts covers selecting a web template from openwebdesign.org and applying it to a Rails 2.0 scaffold site.

RubyOSA provides a bridge from Ruby to the Apple Event Manager. It allows Ruby programs to automate Mac OS X applications in the same way as AppleScript. Check out my demo on controlling iTunes with Ruby and even my Wuby web application to control iTunes! Justin Williams of Mac Zealots give a great introduction to Ruby OSA as well. http://maczealots.com/tutorials/rubyosa/

If this isn't entertaining I don't know what is! David Koontz, President of Rising Tide Software (http://www.risingtidesoftware.com), gave a speech in front of 50 Java professionals at the Phoenix Java User Group (http://www.phxjug.org/) and convinced them all to switch to JRuby! I tell you, Sun should hire this guy. He knows his stuff (both java and ruby) - and he has charisma!