I guess quite a few Bitwise readers (in the UK, at any rate) know me best for the innumerable programming tutorials which I’ve written over the years in PC Plus, PC Pro, PC Answers, PC Magazine, Computer Shopper and various other magazines...

The Ruby Programming Language - $39.99 (£24.99)
by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto
O’Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/
444 pp.
ISBN 10: 0-596-51617-7
ISBN 13: 9780596516178

The Developer Tools group of Borland - the people who make tools such as JBuilder and Delphi - will henceforth be a part of Embarcadero Technologies, a cross platform database company.

RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is a fashionable acronym which has now been reversed by Adobe to create AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) - a collection of code and utilities aimed at creating desktop applications using a mix of technologies (HTML, XML, ActionScript and Flash) which had hitherto been confined (well, mostly) to web browsers.

After all this time I still don’t know my way around the ‘ribbon’ in Microsoft Word 2007...

When I began programming with the Ruby language and the Rails web framework ( ‘Ruby On Rails’), a few years ago, the first thing I tried to find was a visual IDE. I’d assumed that every programming language worth its salt had one of those these days. I searched and I searched but none could I find.

Just when you think you’ve seen everything there is to see in application development tools, along comes Morfik! In some ways, Morfik’s visual Ajax IDE, WebOS AppsBuilder, is bucking all the trends. All the most fashionable web developers tell me that the best tools for application development are a simple text editor and a command prompt. Morfik’s IDE is way out there at the other extreme - it lets you create Ajax applications by dragging, dropping, coding and debugging all inside an elegant ‘visual’ environment.

Mindjet MindManager 7
$349/£199 (other editions from $99/£49)
Free Trial Available
http://www.mindjet.com/

“MindManager Pro 7 enables companies and individuals to work smarter, think creatively and save time by revolutionizing the visual capture and management of information.” - Call me a cynic, but when I hear that some piece of software is going to make me a better, smarter, more productive human being, my first inclination is to put it back in the box and reach for the snake-oil.

The last couple of years have seen a great many changes for CodeGear - not least the name! The company that I knew for so many years as ‘Borland’ has been reborn as a new company with a new name but it is, nonetheless, owned by the old company with the old name. Just in case you missed these developments I should explain that Borland - the company that I have always associated with developer tools - has transformed itself into a company that specialises in mysterious acronyms such as ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and SDO (Software Delivery Optimization) - terms which, in my ignorance, I must confess mean next to nothing to me. Meanwhile, the ‘real’ Borland - the Borland that gave the world a range of fast ‘Turbo’-branded compilers and the ‘Visual Pascal’ Delphi language - has now condensed into CodeGear.

In this series, I’m going to start at the bottom of the DLR pond and work upwards towards the light.Specifically, I’m going to construct an ANTLR tree grammar for a calculator and show you how to wire this into a DLR framework. This is about as simple as you can get with the DLR and still do something meaningful. It’s a lot simpler than the Microsoft example, ToyScript, which comes with the Iron Python distribution. I’ve tried hard to pare the calculator example down to the absolute minimum required to actually do something non-trivial. But I don’t want to denigrate ToyScript – it’s an excellent example of how to use the DLR, but in my view it’s not quite introductory enough.