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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

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.

13 Responses to “At last: scRUBYt! 0.4.1 is out”

  1. December 14th, 2008 at 1:42 am

    Luca G. Soave says:

    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

  2. December 14th, 2008 at 5:23 am

    Peter says:

    Thanks Luca!

    This is just the start btw - much more to come in the future :-)

  3. December 15th, 2008 at 6:36 am

    Max says:

    Hey Peter,
    also thanks from me. I am already working with scRUBYt! for one year now and constantly promoting it :) 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.
    - Max

  4. December 15th, 2008 at 7:05 am

    Peter says:

    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!

  5. December 17th, 2008 at 1:22 am

    Ruby, Rails, Web2.0 » Blog Archive » AJAX Scraping with scRUBYt! - LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Yahoo Suggestions says:

    [...] announced on the scRUBYt! blog, there is a brand new release of scRUBYt!, (among other additions) enabling AJAX scraping. [...]

  6. December 24th, 2008 at 4:23 am

    anurag says:

    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

  7. January 7th, 2009 at 5:56 am

    Max says:

    Thanks Peter, that would be great, as I am still bound to JRuby 1.1.3 when using scRUBYt! 0.3.4.

    • Max

  8. January 11th, 2009 at 10:45 pm

    Irving says:

    Are the Forums down?? (http://agora.scrubyt.org/)

  9. January 14th, 2009 at 7:47 pm

    Sam says:

    Hey, what happened to the support forum?

    Is scrubyt still being developed?

    thanks

  10. January 19th, 2009 at 2:10 pm

    Peter says:

    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)

  11. January 23rd, 2009 at 11:08 am

    Pascal says:

    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?

  12. January 25th, 2009 at 2:32 am

    admin says:

    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.

  13. January 25th, 2009 at 2:33 am

    admin says:

    Yeah guys the forum is down… working on a replacement google groups ML.

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