Okay, great. So we have five recipients of RubyCentral’s codefest grant program (a contest featured in January’s CashHanded #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5.) The five recipients will receive up to $500 in grant money, to be used towards hosting a gathering of Rubyists, all united in building libraries for Ruby.

Here are the winners and their locations. So, if you live in any of these areas, think about contacting the host listed below and offering your services. (You won’t get paid, so.) If you’re not sure how to contact them, go ahead and use the comments for this entry to express your willfulness.

• Dave Tiu (Boston, MA): Displaytag, a port to Ruby/Rails of a popular Java/Struts library for displaying and interacting with HTML table presentations.
• Andrey Melnik (Ukraine): Ruby/AGG and Ruby/View, a wrapper library for AGG, allowing users to draw high-quality graphics. Later this will be a base for Ruby-centric GUI toolkit similar to Rebol/view which is also based on AGG.
• James Edward Gray II (Oklahoma City, OK): a pure Ruby framework for building multiplayer Web games offering two key services: Game management and design tools. Gambit can manage player’s accounts, game hosting and joining, player histories, in-game communication systems and out-of-game notifications for in-game activities.
• Brian McCallister (Delaware): bindings to the Lucene search engine via SWIG and GCJ.
• Ryan Davis (Seattle, WA): RubyGems cleanup and enhancements. A team of 12 has already prepared to attend this!