Sam Ruby

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer, W3C working group co-chair and Apache Software Foundation director 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. He resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.^[1]

He is a co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group.

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 is a current Director of the Apache Software Foundation,^[2] as well as being the foundation's Assistant Secretary; he also served as Vice President of Legal Affairs and was the former Chair of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects; the ASF Committers page provides a complete and current listing of Apache projects to which he is actively contributing. 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 validator, which he developed along with Mark Pilgrim. The Feed Validator About page states, "The validator was conceived and designed by Mark Pilgrim, who also wrote most of the test cases and designed the web front end. Much of the actual back end coding was done by Sam Ruby." It's able to validate Atom feeds as well as RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 feeds.

PHP Group

Ruby also contributed to the PHP Group, in particular to the Java Extension.^[3]

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/RSS feed aggregator, the codebase that began as a radical refactoring of the Planet 2.0 feed aggregator in 2006.^[4]

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 TC39 group that standardized the Common Language Infrastructure for Microsoft's .NET Framework.^[5]

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.^[6] 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.^[7]

Bibliography

• Agile Web Development with Rails 4 (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2013) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) ISBN 1-937-78556-4
• RESTful Web APIs (O'Reilly Publishing, 2013) (with Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen) ISBN 1-449-35806-3
• Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2 (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2011) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) ISBN 1-934-35654-9
• Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) ISBN 1-934-35616-6
• RESTful Web Services (O'Reilly Publishing, 2007) (with Leonard Richardson) ISBN 0-596-52926-0

See also

• Apache Software Foundation
• Atom (standard)

References

External links

• Intertwingly - Sam Ruby's weblog (the name is a reference to Ted Nelson's coinage "intertwingularity").
• Feed Validator - Sam Ruby's feed validator for Atom and RSS.