Sam Ruby

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular [http://feedvalidator.org 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. [http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xml03/html/bio/b14640ed01752d0e33acef8f44.html]

Background

Sam Ruby received a B.A. in Mathematics from Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia. Sam was hired immediately out of college by IBM and has worked there since.

Open source

Ruby has been very active within the various open source projects.

Apache Project

He is a current Director and former Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, as well as the former Chairman of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects. A complete and current listing of projects to which he is actively contributing code is available here: [http://people.apache.org/~jim/committers.html Apache Committers] .

In terms of code contributions, he was one of the early Ant contributors, and the creator of Gump.

PHP Group

Ruby also contributed to the PHP Group, in particular to the [http://www.zend.com/zend/week/week42.php Java Extension] . [http://www.php.net/credits.php]

Ruby on Ruby

Recently Sam Ruby has started doing development in the Ruby programming language, leading to some confusion between the person and the language. However, there is no formal connection—they both just have the same name.

tandardization efforts

Ruby has also been very active within the various standards groups.

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 [http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm] .

Web Feed Validator

Ruby developed the majority of the back-end code for the primary web syndication feed validator and is now its maintainer: [http://www.feedvalidator.org feedvalidator.org] . It is able to validate Atom web feeds and RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 web feeds.

Atom Web Feed Standard

The project which eventually became the Atom web feed standard was started by a blog posting by Sam Ruby in 2002 entitled [http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1472.html "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. [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/06/23/SamsPie] Sam Ruby was the secretary of the IETF [http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/OLD/atompub-charter.html 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.

ee also

* Apache Software Foundation
* Atom (standard)

External links

* " [http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/ Intertwingly] - Sam Ruby's weblog (the name is a reference to Ted Nelson's coinage "intertwingularity").
* " [http://feed-validator.w3c-at.de/ Feed Validator W3C] - Feed Validation Service for Atom and RSS.
* " [http://feedvalidator.org/ Feed Validator] - Sam Ruby's feed validator for Atom and RSS.

References

* " [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-samruby.html Web services visionary] " - an interview with Sam Ruby (IBM developerworks)
* " [http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/242 Sam Ruby on the O'Reilly Network]
* " [http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/SamRuby SamRuby page on Atom Wiki] " - accessed February 22, 2006.
* " [http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xml03/html/bio/b14640ed01752d0e33acef8f44.html Biography: Sam Ruby] - from XML Conference and Expo 2003.