I’ve been working on and off with Ruby in the past, and really like the language. There are some quirks and inconsistencies, but overall, it’s still the best of the lot. I’m working with Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, and Ruby bridges the platforms quite nicely, including the user interface layer. Only threads and IO are a bit tricky.
The project I recently spent most time on is a framework for communicating with the Newton via the regular Dock protocol (it works over serial, Bluetooth or TCP/IP connections). It is in spirit a replacement of the Desktop Connection Library, written in Ruby. I’m using the 40Hz repository on SourceForge to host the Subversion repository in case you want to check it out. It’s nowhere usable yet though :) But I can connect cleanly to the Newton, and the next step is to fill in the missing commands to do something useful.
The purpose of such a framework is to help with the basic use cases of installing packages and dumping data from the Newton, but in a wider context, it would be nice to use it as the basis for synchronization or backup/restore.