This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Laurent Sansonetti. Original Post: RubyNode to the Rescue! Feed Title: lrz's diary Feed URL: http://www.chopine.be/lrz/diary/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: lrz's diary Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Laurent Sansonetti Latest Posts From lrz's diary

If you're developing with RubyCocoa you probably hear about rb_nibtool.rb, a new tool introduced since 0.11.0 that synchronizes your RubyCocoa source code with .nib files, basically exchanging the Interface Builder metadata such as the class hierarchy, outlets and actions.

But this tool has an important drawback. It collects the IB metadata from a given Ruby source code file by evaluating it. This is bad for a security point of view, but also for performances and robustness (the evaluation can be broken by a missing library or symbol).

But this is now the past. Since yesterday, rb_nibtool.rb will now use the very excellent RubyNode library, if present in the system, for parsing the given Ruby source file and extracting the interesting bits. If RubyNode isn't installed, it will default to the old code path.

RubyNode is an extremely interesting library, if you're used to hack the Ruby source code, it's basically a wrapper to the internal NODE data type and the parser. It should definitely be part of the standard library.