Finally, the new and long-awaited version of RubyOnRails framework has been officially released! In this new version a lot of new features has been introduced but…it is not possible to list them within this page. Summarizing, new features and modifications have been introduced in the following components:

• ActionPack
• ActiveRecord
• ActiveSupport
• ActionMailer
• ActiveResource
• ActiveSupport

You can see a complete list of the new introduced features following this link. To install the new version of the framework by gem you can execute the following command:

gem install rails -y --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org

I want inform you about this new interesting italian initiative, officially presented yesterday: “PiratPartiet - Diritti digitali“, a new on-line journal, based on the OpenContent and completli dedicated to “cyber rights” aspects.

Citing the article from Punto Informatico PiratPartiet is (italian language) “È una testata distribuita con formula OpenContent [...] Nasce con una formula nuova, non ha un costo fisso per il lettore ma è affidato alla sua soddisfazione, cioè a offerta. Nasce dal web, dalla Rete con un percorso che è inverso a quello degli altri giornali. Viene stampato direttamente dagli autori e perché no anche dai lettori, ecco perché il formato A4, è il formato della stragrande maggioranza delle stampanti che quasi tutti noi abbiamo in casa. La licenza con la quale viene distribuito prevede che possiate anche farne opere derivate……. se ritenete ne valga la pena, purché citiate l’autore [...]“.

It will be interesting to see how this new initiative will procede in the next months.

This year the 4th workshop “Semantic Web Applications And Perspectives” (SWAP 2007) will take place in Bari (Italy), from 18th to 20th December, 2007, at the IT Department of the Università degli Studi di Bari.

The workshop will provide a unique opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners in the challenging area of Semantic Web technologies. In particular, SWAP 2007 aims at giving an overview of work going on in the Italian (and not only) Semantic Web community.

The official program of the workshop is not published yet. Anyway, briefly, the first day (18th December) will be dedicated to tutorials, while the second and the third day will be dedicated to the presentation of the accepted works/papers.

The invited talks are:

• Chris Welty: research scientist at ‘IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York;
• Giovanni Tummarello: researcher at Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway (Ireland).

An update (4th December): The offical program of the workshop has been published. You can see it following this link.

An interesting event: the first italian conference dedicated to RubyOnRails. RailsToItaly 2007 will be on th 26th and 27th October in the nice city of Pisa in the IT department of University of Pisa in “largo B. Pontecorvo” (room Gerace). If you are interested in attending the conference, please register. If you wish to deliver a lecture or a presentation about Ruby or RubyOnRails or related topics, please follow the call for papers. At the Rails To Italy 2007 conference some important members of the Rails Community has been invited. At the moment people who’ve already confirmed their attendance are: David Heinemeier Hansson and Eyal Oren. For more information see the RailsToItaly official website .

After an hard work, today DBin 0.58 have been released. This release includes a lot of bugs-fix, a little improvement to the P2P system and some little but interesting new fuatures. DBin 0.58 is available for Windows systems (official version) and for Unix/Linux and Mac system (beta version).

Tomorrow the first Kickoff Meeting of Working Package 5, related to the european Discovery Project, will begin. The meeting will last 3 days (from 2nd April to 5th April) and it will be completely dedicated to make a first analysis of the new Talia system as well as a first contact point to met every developers of Talia system. The meeting will be in Pisa in the Net7 offices.

Tomorrow, 8th March 2007, I will give a seminar about the Ruby On Rails framework. The seminar will be at Università Politecnica delle Marche at about 15:30 in DEIT department. The slides shown during the seminar will be freely released in the download section on my personal website.