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Ruby's is not known for its deftness with XML. On RubyFlow, I considered calling the community to arms over it, and solicited twenty responses on what the problem is, and what we could do about it. Robert Fischer was lamenting on the state of Ruby's libxml library, and didn't seem to like REXML much either. Tim Bray has also had a few complaints about REXML. It seemed there was a problem to be fixed; a gap in the market, as it were, for a decent XML parser for Ruby. Hpricot, despite really being an HTML parser, would have to get us by in the meantime.

Today, however, libxml-ruby 0.8.0 has been released, and Charlie Savage explains why this is such a big deal. libxml-ruby now runs on Windows (thanks to Charlie), doesn't segfault all the time, and the bindings have all been fixed over the past year (thanks to Dan Janowski). You can get going with it right now with a simple gem install libxml-ruby

libxml-ruby is known for its performance, the latest release doesn't disappoint. For a range of simple tasks, libxml clocks in at ten times quicker than Hpricot like-for-like and between 30 and 60 times faster than REXML. Charles adds:

In addition to performance, the libxml-ruby bindings provide impressive coverage of libxml's functionality. Goodies include:

• SAX
• DOM
• XMLReader (streaming interface)
• XPath
• XPointer
• XML Schema
• DTDs
• XSLT (split into the libxslt-ruby bindings)

Charles is planning to write a proper tutorial in the next week, covering some of the key features, but suggests referring to the API documentation in the meantime. The test suite (located in the test directory that comes with libxml-ruby) also looks like a great resource for code examples; very clean and straightforward. If you have any libxml-ruby tutorials or resources of your own, please post them in the comments here.

Congratulations to all of those involved in libxml-ruby's long history and especially to Charlie Savage for giving it the finish push to this mature state. Ruby's XML woes are tempered, for now at least.

Discover Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer, a tool that analyzes javacore and diagnoses monitor locks and thread activities. Using updated Version 2.8, learn to identify the root cause of hangs, deadlocks, resource contention, and bottlenecks in Java threads.

SQL Maestro Group announce the release of Firebird Maestro 8.7, a powerful Windows GUI solution for Firebird administration and database development. New version features support for Firebird 2.1 Windows authentication and some interface improvements. The company also announces the 30% discount for all their products till Jul 20.                    

Imagine creating Web-page graphics dynamically using just code. Creating and manipulating images is yours for the doing with the power of PHP. This tutorial steps through using the GD library, showing you how to create and alter images on Web pages. It starts with the GD construct, and then builds on it to showcase graphics techniques.

Subversion 1.5 has just been released and has a whole raft of new features that developers have been asking for. To take full advantage of all the new features you’ll need to upgrade both your server and clients, but both will inter-operate so you can upgrade gradually if you wish. Server upgrade does not require a dump and reload, but as usual with any major upgrade you should back up your repositories first. Some of the new features in 1.5 require a repository upgrade—after installing the 1.5 server software use svnadmin upgrade to bring your repositories up to the newest format, Subversion won’t do this automatically.

news on timeline via twitter

Maybe you're trying to keep track of the traffic waiting for you on the commute home, or perhaps you're tracking the objects and people floating around Second Life or another virtual world. Wouldn't it be nice if you could track that kind of thing right from your browser? Learn how to use Ajax to create an animated, self-updating radar screen that tracks spatial objects.

As it turns out the RC3 has been re-released as the final version without modification, a fact supported by the files themselves

getfirebug.com has been down for the last week or so - especially bad timing given that Firefox 3. I decided to just transfer ownership of getfirebug.com to Mozilla, who will take much better care of it than the crappy web host it has been running on to this point. getfirebug.com may not be back online tomorrow when Firefox 3 ships, but fret not, because Firebug 1.2 is already available to download from addons.mozilla.org. If you have Firebug 1.0x installed in Firefox 2 then you should get automatically upgraded when you install Firefox 3.

Nice and clean online RSS filter that lets you filter any XML or RSS feed and get only the stuff you're interested in.

Firefox 3.0 will be release this June17 in 45 languages worldwide.

New Slideshow App built by a javascript port of Objective-C ....

Adobe's plans for the AIR runtime. How about USB support anyone? ;)

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 is available in more than 45 languages as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed.

Ever since Macromedia and Adobe merged, we have been waiting for a day where PDF and Flash played really nice together, and today is the day. Very symbolic for the folks from the companies before the merge.

The recent acquisitions of BEA and CodeGear alter the tools landscape, leaving less and less choice for developers.