Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

At Integrum, we do "tech-talks" every Tuesday and Thursday. A member of the team gives a short presentation about something technical so as to share his or her knowledge with everyone else. I personally enjoy these talks because it gives me an extra opportunity to learn cool stuff from my oh-so-brilliant co-workers.

This past Tuesday, it was my turn to present during tech-talk time. I never know what to talk about, so when Josh suggested that I talk about Runt, I ran with it. Last week I was introduced Runt while trying to incorporate recurring events into a project. Runt is a gem that implements recurring event patterns as described in a paper by Martin Fowler. It allows you to easily define a temporal expression, which represents a set of dates and/or times that an event will occur.

The basic idea is to define a temporal expression using one or many of Runt's temporal expression classes and then use the include? method to ask the expression if it includes a particular date. In the example below, I created a temporal expression for an event that happens every week on Thursday.

I definitely recommend taking a look at Runt if you need to work with recurring events. Below are the slides from my presentation, and here is the rubyforge site for Runt.