Monday, December 21, 2009

Side trip to Ruby

The office was closed today, so I took advantage of the free time to work on a side project. It's one I started earlier this year: creating OOXML files with Ruby.

This project was a nice change from the normal work. (That work uses C++.) I needed some time to "dust off" the programs and refresh myself on their internals. I had last used them back in October, and while they are not that large, they are large enough to require some thought.

The organization of the project helped me, as did the test framework. I've divided the project into a two groups of programs. One group generates a set of files in a mini-language that is specific to XML, and the second group (a single program, actually) converts the mini-language scripts into proper XML. I find this division of labor yields a clean design and small programs that are easily constructed and modified.

I also met some former co-workers for lunch. They were working, so I went to them and we had lunch at a nice little Irish pub. It was good to chat with them and catch up on news.


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