At last: scRUBYt! 0.4.1 is out
After more than a year, I’d like to announce a new release of scRUBYt! and set “scRUBYt!”.is_vaporware? = false. w00t!
Thanks to Glen Gillen, it is possible now to use FireWatir as the agent for navigation, enabling AJAX/more robust scraping via Firefox/FireWatir.
Another big news is that the RubyInline, ParseTree and Ruby2Ruby dependency was dropped since we couldn’t solve this problem for win32 for one year. Yay for the windows users (and other OS users juggling various versions of the above stuff).
Of course a lot of bugs were fixed as well.
On the non-source code front, we have
- An all new homepage with all the useful links
- A github repository
- A small (at the moment only!) scraper repository
- A Lighthouse tracker
- TextMate bundle
and probably other cool stuff which I can’t remember right now! Will update the article later.
What’s next?
The biggest news is that scRUBYt! is going to be rewritten from scratch - the work has already been started by Glenn Gillen. scRUBYt! has grown too big for our taste, so we decided to start anew, aiming for 100% rSpec coverage, refactored code, speed/performance optimization and leaving all the cruft behind. So scRUBYt! 0.4.1, the last one based on the original scRUBYt! will be supported until the new, rewritten one (0.5.0) comes out and takes it’s place.
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 6:04 am and is filed under News & Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:42 am
It’s a pleasure having you back Peter! I’d like to say thank you for all I learned from your code scRUBYt! I also apreciate the REVAMP of your sites and the new GitHub repository ( http://github.com/scrubber/scrubyt/tree/master ).
Keep on the good work
Bye Luca
December 14th, 2008 at 5:23 am
Thanks Luca!
This is just the start btw - much more to come in the future
December 15th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Hey Peter,
What I would like to know is: Should the newest version be working fine with jruby as well? I already tried it, but did not have success yet.. Right now I am still using Paul Nikitochkin’s scRUBYt! 0.3.4 for jruby.
also thanks from me. I am already working with scRUBYt! for one year now and constantly promoting it
- Max
December 15th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Max:
Sure, it should! I am not a JRuby guy myself, but I cam across another guy (@grantmichaels on twitter) who set it up with the most recent one. I asked him to post a tutorial, he said he’ll do it - so I’ll put it here once I get it from him!
December 17th, 2008 at 1:22 am
[...] announced on the scRUBYt! blog, there is a brand new release of scRUBYt!, (among other additions) enabling AJAX scraping. [...]
December 24th, 2008 at 4:23 am
Hey Peter,
I am successfully scraped the site. Please let me know how can I close the instance of Firefox on successfully completion.
Regards,
Anurag
January 7th, 2009 at 5:56 am
Thanks Peter, that would be great, as I am still bound to JRuby 1.1.3 when using scRUBYt! 0.3.4.
January 11th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Are the Forums down?? (http://agora.scrubyt.org/)
January 14th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hey, what happened to the support forum?
Is scrubyt still being developed?
thanks
January 19th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Sure. I am just fixing the forums (probably replacing them with a mailing list).
Scrubyt is actively developed - see http://github.com/scrubber/scrubyt/tree/master (mostly in the skimr branch right now)
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Good work!
I got a small Rails app up that let’s you define, store and execute extractors. Maybe similar to that CMS you’re planing
Check it at http://www.codez.ch/bitrip.
Will 0.5.0 become thread-safe?
January 25th, 2009 at 2:32 am
Pascal,
Wow, that extractor executor looks great - the “CMS” I am planning is much more primitive (and/or it kind of serves a different purpose) - but I always wanted to create something similar to your stuff. How do you ensure that someone doesn’t enter something malicious into say a script pattern?
Thread safety… don’t know, have to ask Glenn since he is working almost exclusively on 0.5.0 - I am joining ASAP too, have been swamped lately.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:33 am
Yeah guys the forum is down… working on a replacement google groups ML.
April 21st, 2010 at 7:30 am
Wow - this is an awesome tool - I’m just getting into Ruby and I was considering writing something like this for bulk data loads……thanks again!