The Gateway

Hacking the Gateway

[Update: The Ruby Gateway was retired in June of 2011. Our community simply grew past the point were we needed to combine the various groups, in my opinion.]

Though I rewrote the current Gateway and I handle the maintenance, it really belongs to the Ruby community. Because of that, I'm going to release the two primary source files on this blog for all to view and critique. This may have value to those who want to know how the Gateway works, those who would like to implement similar technologies, and those who would like to purpose changes to the Gateway code.

I do welcome purposed changes to the Gateway, but let's set some ground rules for the right way to make suggestions:

• I will show the important elements of the Gateway code and do my best to explain it as I go. In return, please take the time to read what I write about the code and try to understand how it works. Poorly developed change requests increase my maintenance time with the Gateway, which all comes out of my free time, so please be considerate.
• You purpose changes to the Gateway by commenting on the code articles. This is intended to be a public discussion with all of us working together. Don't email me or Ruby Talk ideas, I'm monitoring the comments here.
• Show code in your requests. I don't want to throw the Gateway in a publicly accessible Subversion repository and start taking patches for several reasons. If you want a change, convince me to implement it. The best way to do that is to throw around some code showing me how we would build your request and how it would make the Gateway better.
• I am thinking about some elements of the Gateway you are not, like the fact that I run this code on a server provided by my work where security is a consideration and the level of maintenance a change will inflict on me. I ask only that you keep this in mind as we debate changes. In return, I will be as open minded to improvements as possible.
• Gateway changes will not happen overnight. (See note about free time above.) Please be patient.