Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to web standards and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the

Atom Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons. Every solid, liquid, gas, ...

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. He resides in

Raleigh Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Southeas ...

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...

Background

Sam Ruby received a B.A. in Mathematics from

Christopher Newport University Christopher Newport University (CNU) is a public university in Newport News, Virginia. It was founded in 1960 and is named after Christopher Newport, captain of one of the ships which carried settlers of Jamestown, the first permanent English ...

Newport News Newport News () is an independent city in the U.S. state of Virginia. At the 2020 census, the population was 186,247. Located in the Hampton Roads region, it is the 5th most populous city in Virginia and 140th most populous city in the Uni ...

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...

. Ruby was hired immediately out of college by IBM and has worked there since.

Apache Project

Ruby currently serves on the board of the Apache Software Foundation. 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 Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors in the Cretaceous period. More than 13,800 of an estimated total of ...

contributors, as well as being the creator of Gump.

Feed Validator

Ruby is the principal maintainer of the Feed

validator A validator is a computer program used to check the validity or syntactical correctness of a fragment of code or document. The term is commonly used in the context of validating HTML,Tittel, Ed, and Mary C. Burmeister. HTML 4 for Dummies. --For d ...

, which he developed along with

Mark Pilgrim Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authored a popular blog, and has written several books, including ''Dive into Python'', a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Docu ...

. It's able to validate

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

PHP

Ruby also contributed to

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

, in particular to the Java Extension.

Ruby

Sam Ruby has done development in the

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...

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

/ RSS

feed aggregator Feed or The Feed may refer to: Animal foodstuffs * Animal feed, food given to domestic animals in the course of animal husbandry ** Fodder, foodstuffs manufactured for animal consumption ** Forage, foodstuffs that animals gather themselves, ...

, the codebase that began as a radical refactoring of the Planet 2.0

in 2006.

html5lib

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

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 TC49 group that standardized the Common Language Infrastructure for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

.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

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 The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

AtomPub working group. This working group completed RFC 4287, the

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 ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripting o ...

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 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

, 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 and

David Heinemeier Hansson David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer, and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp. Hansson co-wrote ''Agil ...

) *''Agile Web Development with Rails 4'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2013) (with Dave Thomas and

) *''RESTful Web APIs'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2013) (with Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen) *''Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2011) (with Dave Thomas and

) *''Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009) (with Dave Thomas and

) *''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 A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

(the name is a reference to

Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and '' hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms '' trans ...

coinage Coinage may refer to: * Coins, standardized as currency * Neologism, coinage of a new word * '' COINage'', numismatics magazine * Tin coinage, a tax on refined tin * Protologism ''Protologism'' is a term coined in 2003 by the American literary ...

" intertwingularity").
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