Tuesday, September 30, 2008

puts "Hello world"

Hello everybody from the magical world of Ruby: that's at least the meaning of the title...

Guess what? I'm learning Ruby in my spare time and I'm having a lot of fun. Well, I find this language concise, fascinating and powerful. So I strongly suggest every programmer that codes for fun (just like me) to give it a try. See the official website for more information.

For those of you who are guessing why I came to Ruby, I have two answers. The first is funny: after watching Giles Bowkett's fantastic presentation on his project Archeopterix, I was curious about the language he used for that project. The second is more serious: I'd like to experiment all the power of Ruby on Rails, a framework for developing web applications quicky. (As you probably know, I come from J2EE). So, before learning Rails, I need to understand Ruby.

Yesterday night I was trying to do a program in Ruby that given a URL or a file finds all the Youtube videos referenced inside it. After getting these information, I then added some logic to download them automatically. BTW I learned a lot of things about downloading a video from Youtube, given his ID. Also I used Youtube Data API in order to get some info about each video.

I will post it soon. Stay tuned!