Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the
Apache Software FoundationThe Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, USA, in June 1999,.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...
's open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
web feed standard and the feedvalidator.org web service.
He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
. He resides in
RaleighRaleigh is the capital city of the state of North Carolina, the seat of Wake County and the second largest city in North Carolina. Raleigh is known as the "City of Oaks" for its many oak trees. According to the U.S...
,
North CarolinaNorth Carolina is a state located on the Atlantic Seaboard in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties...
.
He is the co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group.
Sam Ruby received a B.A.
Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the
Apache Software FoundationThe Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, USA, in June 1999,.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...
's open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
web feed standard and the feedvalidator.org web service.
He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
. He resides in
RaleighRaleigh is the capital city of the state of North Carolina, the seat of Wake County and the second largest city in North Carolina. Raleigh is known as the "City of Oaks" for its many oak trees. According to the U.S...
,
North CarolinaNorth Carolina is a state located on the Atlantic Seaboard in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties...
.
He is the co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group.
Background
Sam Ruby received a B.A. in Mathematics from
Christopher Newport UniversityChristopher Newport University, or CNU, is a liberal arts university located in Newport News, Virginia, United States. It was established in 1961 as a two-year school of the College of William and Mary. It became a four-year college in 1971, and a university in 1992. Former United States Senator...
, Newport News,
VirginiaThe Commonwealth of Virginia is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" because it is the birthplace of eight U.S. presidents. The geography and climate of the state are shaped by the Blue...
. Sam was hired immediately out of college by
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
and has worked there since.
Apache Project
Ruby is a current Director of the
Apache Software FoundationThe Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, USA, in June 1999,.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...
, as well as being both the foundation's Secretary and Vice President of Legal Affairs, and the former Chairman of the
Apache Jakarta ProjectThe Jakarta Project creates and maintains open source software for the Java platform. It operates as an umbrella project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, and all of Jakarta products are released under the Apache License.-Subprojects:...
. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects; the
ASF Committers page provides a complete and current listing of Apache projects to which he is actively contributing. Notably, he was one of the early
AntApache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects....
contributors, as well as being the creator of
GumpApache Gump is an open source Continuous Integration system, which aims to build and test all the open source Java projects, every night. Its aim is to make sure that all the projects are compatible, at both the API level and in terms of functionality matching specifications...
.
feedvalidator.org
Ruby is the principal maintainer of the
feedvalidator.org feedA web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an Internet aggregator...
validatorA validator is a computer program used to check the validity or syntactical correctness of a fragment of code or document. The term is commonly used in the context of validating HTML, CSS and XML documents or RSS feeds though it can be used for any defined format or language.- HTML Validator :In...
, which he developed along with
Mark PilgrimMark Pilgrim is a software developer and writer. He is a popular blogger, and his books include Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language...
(the feedvalidator.org
About page states, "The validator was conceived and designed by Mark Pilgrim, who also wrote most of the test cases and designed the web front end. Much of the actual back end coding was done by Sam Ruby."). It's able to validate
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
feeds as well as
RSSRSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...
0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 feeds.
PHP Group
Ruby also contributed to the
PHP GroupPHP, or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development, to produce dynamic web pages. It can be embedded into HTML and generally runs on a web server, which needs to be configured to process PHP code and create web...
, in particular to the
Java Extension.
Ruby on Ruby
Sam Ruby has done development in the
RubyRuby is a dynamic, reflective, general purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was initially developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
programming language, leading to some confusion between the person and the language. However, there is no formal connection—they both just coincidentally have the same name.
Venus
Ruby is the author of
Venus, an
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
/
RSSRSS is a three-letter abbreviation that can stand for a wide variety of terms:-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:...
feed aggregator, the codebase for which began as a radical refactoring of the Planet 2.0 feed aggregator.
html5lib
Ruby is a developer member of the
html5lib project, with his primary contribution being the initial port of html5lib to the
RubyRuby is a dynamic, reflective, general purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was initially developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
programming language.
Standardization efforts
Ruby has been active within various standards development organizations.
ECMA standardization of the .NET Framework CLI
Ruby was the convener of the
ECMAEcma International ' is an international, private non-profit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association changed its name to reflect the organization's international reach...
TC39 group that standardized the
Common Language InfrastructureThe Common Language Infrastructure is an open specification developed by Microsoft that describes the executable code and runtime environment that form the core of the Microsoft .NET Framework and the free and open source implementations Mono and Portable.NET...
for
MicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices...
's
.NET FrameworkThe Microsoft .NET Framework is a software framework that can be installed on computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems. It includes a large library of coded solutions to common programming problems and a virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written specifically for...
.
Atom
The project which eventually became the
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
web feed standard was started by a blog posting by Sam Ruby in 2002 entitled
"what makes a log entry". This blog posting eventually became a wiki project which acted as a rallying point for people looking to improve upon the frozen RSS format. Sam Ruby was the secretary of the IETF
AtomPub working group. This working group completed RFC 4287, the
AtomThe name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...
format specification ("The Atom Syndication Format"), in December 2005 and RFC 5023, "The Atom Publishing Protocol", in October 2007.
ECMAScript
Ruby is a member of the
ECMAScriptECMAScript is a scripting language, standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used on the web, especially in the form of its three best-known dialects, JavaScript, ActionScript, and JScript.-History:JavaScript was originally developed...
technical committee (ECMAScript TC39); his primary contribution to the group is in driving the effort to add Decimal support to ECMAScript.
HTML5
Ruby was an early adopter of HTML5, and has offered a number of concrete proposals which were subsequently incorporated into the
HTML5 draft. He has been appointed co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group from 5 January 2009.
Books
Ruby is the co-author, with Leonard Richardson, of the book
RESTful Web Services (published in 2007), and also co-author, with
Dave ThomasDave Thomas is a computer programmer and author/editor. He has written about Ruby.Dave and partner Andy Hunt wrote the The Pragmatic Programmer and run The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company.Dave Thomas lives in Flower Mound, Texas...
,
David Heinemeier HanssonDavid Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals....
, et al., of the book
Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (published in March, 2009).
External links
- Intertwingly - Sam Ruby's weblog (the name is a reference to Ted Nelson
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words hypermedia, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics...
's coinageA neologism ; from Greek νές is a newly coined word that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication, period, or event...
"intertwingularityIntertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.Nelson wrote in Computer Lib/Dream Machines :EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED...
").
- Feed Validator - Sam Ruby's feed validator for Atom and RSS.