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by Michael Granger.
Original Post: Redleaf Release Pending
Feed Title: devEiate
Feed URL: http://deveiate.org/feed/rss/blog
Feed Description: A blog about Ruby, codecraft, testing, linguistics, and stuff. Mostly stuff.
I’ve been working for the last 7 months or so on an RDF library for Ruby based on the Redland C library. I tried to use the bindings for it that are distributed under the redland-bindings package, but like with most SWIG-based bindings to C libraries, I found it brought me out of thinking in Ruby whenever I had to call into it. It’s not the author’s fault â a custom binding for any language takes time and a sense for its idioms â but I felt like RDF and Ruby could mesh better than the functional interface could express. I felt like scratching the itch I was feeling would not only help me learn more about Redland and RDF, but it would make the barrier to entry lower for other people interested in using Ruby together with RDF.
So I started Redleaf, and it’s pretty much at the point I wanted it to be for a 1.0 release. There’s still a few features that Redland has that aren’t accessible from Redleaf (graph contexts and transactions are the big ones), and I haven’t even tried it under 1.9 yet. I’m also pretty sure my string translation back and forth from Redland’s unsigned char *s to Ruby’s char *s will cause problems down the road (with UTF8 data, maybe?). Ruby 1.9’s strings-with-encoding are looking pretty good for that, but I have a lot of code to port before I can make the leap to 1.9.
Mostly what’s left to do is documentation work. The API docs are pretty solid, but the manual is only about 20% done. While I think I can probably release without having it done, I’d at least like it to cover the library well enough that people can start using it without too much experimentation.
So I’m off to write some more docs. Hopefully I’ll be far enough along by March that I can release it then.
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