The 3rd day of RubyKaigi 2010 (Morning)

Today is the 3rd day of RubyKaigi 2010.

I attended these sessions in this morning:

• If the session has a movie in English, I just write summaries of the article. Please see that movies if you want more details.
• If the session has a movie in Japanese, I write the article with translating and little-summarizing.
• If the session has no movies in any languges, I try to write the article with little-summarizing.
• But, for Ceremonies and Lightning Talks, I only put the link of movies.
• And I don't translate Q&As in the article because these are the gift for attendees in there.

• The future of the bigdecimal library and the number system of Ruby
  • by Kenta Murata
  • What is BigDecimal
    • BigDecimal class
    • Multiple-precision floating-point number
    • BigMath module : Math module for BidDecimal
  • BigDecimal has been existing for a long time, but there are some problems because this is not maintained frequently.
  • Thread
    • Thread unsafe
    • Fiber unsafe
  • Precision
    • Precision should be owned by Number itself, inherently.
    • But Ruby's BigDecimal does not own its precision.
    • Ruby's Float is same.
    • Mixture of BigDecimal and Float generates Float, not BigDecimal.
  • BigDecimal is initialized only from String.
    • Not able to be initialized from Number.
    • Unbelievably, not able to be initialized from another BigDecimal.
  • Slow calculation
  • Future
    • There are classes of real / integer / rational / complex. But there is no irrational class.
    • ComputableReal : irrational class as algorithm.
    • For instance, Euler's formula does not become -1, currently. So we make it -1, correctly.
• Ruby meets LDAP, choices and case
  • by Kazuaki Takase
  • What is LDAP?
    • RFC4510
    • Lightweight version of DAP
    • Directory = a ledger
    • Entry: Basic unit of LDAP data
    • not only for account database
    • Object class: Definition of what the Entry is.
    • Each object classes have different attributes
      • For instance, 'posixAccount' is an attribute for Unix account.
    • There are some object-oriented cncepts
      • Inheritance
      • Abstract Object Classes
      • Structural Object Classes
      • Auxiliary Object Classes
    • Attributtes: Oftenly, One attribute has many values.
    • Directory Information Tree (DIT)
    • Whole structure of LDAP data
    • Manage entry as tree hierarchically
      • There are best practice in Hierarchical structure, but no specifications
    • Distinguished Name (DN)
      • Relative Distinguished Name(RDN): The unique name in one hierarchy
      • An attritbute described in entry is RDN
      • Concatenating RDNs from the bottom of hierarchy to the top makes the unique name in DIT.
  • Ruby with LDAP
    • There are too many LDAP related gems in rubygems.org
    • 'ruby-net-ldap' was renamed to 'net-ldap'
    • 'ruby-activeldap' was renamed to 'activeldap'
    • ruby-ldap
      • C Extention library = Ruby wrapper for C implementation of RFC1823
      • Low level abstraction
      • Few documents
      • Fast
      • require 'ldap'
    • net-ldap
      • Pure Ruby
      • Slower than ruby-ldap 10 times
      • Abstraction of LDAP connection
      • High portability
      • Good enough RDocs
    • activeldap
      • Implementation like ActiveRecord
      • Slower than net-ldap 3 times
      • Using ruby-ldap, net-ldap and JNDI inside
      • Abstraction of DIT for the class, abstraction of Entry for the instance
      • require 'active_ldap'
  • Case 1
    • Account IDs go apart to each inhouse systems
    • Exsiting some LDAP system already, but this is difficult to SSO-ize.
    • Build another new LDAP system
    • Also build administration application for this
    • Ruby on Rails + ruby-ldap
    • Avoid activeldap because of the hardness to use
    • Encounter the lack of documents, not only of ruby-ldap but also of LDAP itself.
    • Good enough speed and convenience
  • Case 2
    • Integrate distributed systems of employee master, authentification and so on
    • Ruby CGI + ruby-ldap
    • Also implement the modifying function via Samba
    • We knew about OpenLDAP, so we can use ruby-ldap same as OpenLDAP intuitively
  • Case 3
    • activeldap
    • In Hokkaido Information University, we manage some services to use laboratories.
    • And we hold collaboration study to build a Ruby on Rails application for managing students' qualifications
    • Using both activeldap and Authlogic, referring blog post in somewhere.
    • activeldap is the library like ActiveRecord
      • But we don't use activeldap's advantages, so it could be some other libraries :-)
      • difficulties for writing test with activeldap
  • Case 4
    • Managing account information for personnel department and roles of file servers
      • for solving wasted roles: some foldres can be accessed by all
      • for solving password expiration: send the alert mail automatically
    • Rails + activeldap
      • Available validation and association
      • customized script/runner
      • LDAP testing via Rails testing
      • We build up additional LDAP systems for developmet and test environment
      • Switching in config/environments/*.rb
      • Stuck point: fixture
    • But Most difficult point is that personnel department is unconcerned about LDAP :-)
    • many ruby-ldap code examples
    • many acticeldap code examples

N.B. These summaries may be imprecise.

In LDAP session, I agree with the speaker said " Most difficult point is that personnel department is unconcerned about LDAP".