Version 0.8.10 of Diakonos is now available.

With this release, I’d like to welcome Dominik Honnef (dominikh) to the Diakonos development team. He has already made several contributions, including some fixes which were cherry-picked from the master development branch and included in this version. His other contributions to date will be seen in the next version (0.8.11), and I think we can expect more from him in future versions.

Starting with this version, Ruby 1.8 support is officially dropped. Diakonos will now only run on Ruby 1.9. There’s no need to rush the upgrade on your systems; it is quite possible to have both 1.8 and 1.9 installed on the same system. Search the web for how to do this.

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Version 0.8.9 of Diakonos is now available.

This release is primarily an internal refactor release. The only changes visible to the user are bug fixes. These include improvements to the installer, and vastly improved handling of X windows pasting. No more brutally slow terminal pasting!

The changes are listed in greater detail in the changelog:

• Put interaction timer only on first stale session prompt, not any after that.
• Changed all function names from camelCase to snake_case.
• Added –help-dir switch to installer.
• Fixed some issues with installer.
• Changed delete_to_and_from to always assume given character is the left side character when matching pairs.
• Fixed a line number display bug.
• X windows pasting handled much better now.
• Numerous internal refactorings and reorganizations.
• Accepted patches from Decklin Foster.

Report any bugs here, or come visit me in IRC!

The very popular Bagatelle in A minor by Beethoven, commonly known as Für Elise.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

 

 Beethoven - Fur Elise [2:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Someone asked recently on the Ramaze mailing list:

Is Etanni a performance improvement over ERB? I’m just converting a site over to Ramaze and I’m wondering if it’d be worthwhile to convert my ERB tags to Etanni tags?

manveru promptly replied:

ERB is a lot larger, and does a lot more, but usually you don’t use that functionality. Etanni consists of a single regular expression substitution and should be faster than just about any other templating engine around, the whole core source of Etanni is around 4 lines.

So yes, i suggest you use Etanni instead of ERB

He also quickly wrote up some benchmarking code to substantiate his claims, and then enlisted me to solidify matters. I used his code as a base, and ran the same engine test code through better-benchmark. I put the benchmarking code up as a gist. The full results are embedded as a comment at the end of the gist. Here is a summary:

Based on the results of this little test we might conclude: If rendering speed is a concern, but you also want to just stick with your framework’s default engine to minimize gem dependencies, go with Ramaze.

This piece, also known as Der Schärpentanz or Pas des écharpes, is by French pianist and composer Cécile Chaminade.

Read more about my piano recording series here.

 

 Chaminade - Scarf Dance, Op. 37, No. 3 [1:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download