Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to web standards and open source software projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the Atom standard and the Feed Validator web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM and is on the board of the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the A ...

. He resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Background

Sam Ruby received a B.A. in Mathematics from Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia. Ruby was hired immediately out of college by IBM and has worked there since.

Apache Project

Ruby currently serves on the board of the

. He formerly served as President; Assistant Secretary; Director, Vice President of Legal Affairs; and was the former Chair of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects. Notably, he was one of the early Ant contributors, as well as being the creator of Gump.

Feed Validator

Ruby is the principal maintainer of the Feed validator, which he developed along with Mark Pilgrim. It's able to validate Atom feeds as well as

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 feeds.

PHP

Ruby also contributed to PHP, in particular to the Java Extension.

Ruby

Sam Ruby has done development in the Ruby programming language, leading to some confusion between the person's name and the language. However, there is no formal connection—they both just coincidentally have the same name.

Venus

Ruby is the author of Venus, an Atom/

feed aggregator, the codebase that began as a radical refactoring of the Planet 2.0 feed aggregator in 2006.

html5lib

Ruby is a developer member of the html5lib project, with his primary contribution being the initial port of html5lib to the Ruby programming language.

Standardization efforts

Ruby has been active within various standards development organizations.

ECMA standardization of the .NET Framework CLI

Ruby was the convener of the

ECMA Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...

TC49 group that standardized the

Common Language Infrastructure The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is an open specification and technical standard originally developed by Microsoft and standardized by ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC 23271) and Ecma International (ECMA 335) that describes executable code and a runt ...

for Microsoft's

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

Atom

The project which eventually became the Atom web feed standard was started by a blog posting by Sam Ruby in 2002 entitled "what makes a log entry". This blog posting eventually became a wiki project which acted as a rallying point for people looking to improve upon the frozen RSS format. Sam Ruby was the secretary of the IETF AtomPub working group. This working group completed RFC 4287, the Atom format specification ("The Atom Syndication Format"), in December 2005 and RFC 5023, "The Atom Publishing Protocol", in October 2007.

ECMAScript

Ruby is a member of the ECMAScript technical committee (ECMAScript TC39); his primary contribution to the group is in driving the effort to add Decimal support to ECMAScript.

HTML5

Ruby was an early adopter of HTML5, and has offered a number of concrete proposals which were subsequently incorporated into the HTML5 draft. He has been appointed co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group from 5 January 2009.

Bibliography

*''Agile Web Development with Rails 5'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2016) (with

Dave Thomas Dave may refer to: Film, television, and theater * Dave (film), ''Dave'' (film), a 1993 film starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver * Dave (musical), ''Dave'' (musical), a 2018 stage musical adaptation of the film * Dave (TV channel), a digital ...

and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''Agile Web Development with Rails 4'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2013) (with

and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''RESTful Web APIs'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2013) (with Leonard Richardson and

Mike Amundsen Mike may refer to: Animals * Mike (cat), cat and guardian of the British Museum * Mike the Headless Chicken, chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off * Mike (chimpanzee), a chimpanzee featured in several books and documenta ...

) *''Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2011) (with

and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009) (with

and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''RESTful Web Services'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2007) (with Leonard Richardson)

References

Sources

*
Web services visionary
' - an interview with Sam Ruby (IBM developerworks) *
Sam Ruby on the O'Reilly Network
' *
SamRuby page on Atom Wiki
' - accessed February 22, 2006. *

- from XML Conference and Expo 2003.

External links

Intertwingly
- Sam Ruby's weblog (the name is a reference to Ted Nelson's coinage "

intertwingularity Intertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge. Nelson wrote in '' Computer Lib/Dream Machines'' : "EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no " subjects" ...

").
Feed Validator
- Sam Ruby's feed validator for Atom and RSS. {{DEFAULTSORT:Ruby, Sam American bloggers American computer scientists Computer programmers Christopher Newport University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) IBM employees Open source advocates