Timothy Fisher

Over the past year or so I’ve been working on an application that serves as a framework for building a feature rich social networking site. I’ve called this project EngineY. EngineY is a Ruby application that uses the Ruby on Rails framework as its base.  As I was building EngineY, I used a real community site to serve as a test bed for the framework. The framework is currently powering the Michigan Ruby Community site, which provides a central hub for Ruby enthusiasts in Michigan. I’ve recently released the EngineY framework as an open source project hosted at Google Code. The framework supports a widget type of development in that each new feature is built following the same style of implementation allowing new features to be built up relatively quickly. This makes the... (more)

How to Generate Boxscores with Ruby from Live MLB Data

As an avid baseball fan, I’ve always been interested in the statistics that surround baseball. More so than in any other sport, baseball is a game ruled by statistics. In this post, I will describe a program that I wrote in the Ruby language to generate box scores for any Major Leage Baseball(MLB) game by using the live XML data provided by MLB. Ruby makes it easy to do using plain Ruby ... (more)

Timothy Fisher's Java Blog: Java, Ruby, and Rails...

Java, Ruby, and Rails... It's been awhile since my last blog post. Where I have I been? What have I been up to? Well there are a few answers to those questions. Answer one, I've been very busy implementing an enterprise-wide web single-sign-on solution in J2EE for Ford Motor Company. Answer two, in my spare time, I've been bitten by the Ruby/Rails bug that seems to be spreading throughout ... (more)

Ruby on Rails Bible Coming Soon

My next book will be coming in early spring, most likely May, 2008 from Wiley. The book is the Ruby on Rails Bible. The book covers the Rails framework in detail providing an overview of the Ruby programming language, an overview of Rails, detailed chapters on each of the major components of Rails and a walk-through of a complete Rails application. The book will cover Rails 2.0. Major cha... (more)

Three Great Books for Learning and Mastering Ruby on Rails

I tend to read a lot of technical books. My current passion is with the Ruby programming language and the Rails web application framework which is built on top of the Ruby language. I’m also a published technical author myself. The book that I am currently writing is the Ruby on Rails Bible which will be published by Wiley this spring. However, since that is a few months away still, I th... (more)