Content Preview: rss
922 days ago
RailsConf 2007 was a good conference. I look forward to next year. There were about 1600 attendees. There were several business related sessiosn that were good reminders. Working on the business not just for it was a common theme. Making the investment of time to start a small internet business is easier now with Rails reducing the time required. The technical sessions on scaling, design, testing, and code reading were very good. The quality of Passion present in many speakers and attendees is the largest indicator of Ruby and Rails success. The kind of passion I saw can make things happen. One example was the fund raising for charity that was part of the conference. The attendees raised almost $30,000 for charities, and challenge other conferences to do the same. Be about more than just 1s and 0s. Dave Tomas encouraged all attendees to lobby other conferences to adopt a similar stand. If every tech conference raised money for charity we can really make a difference.
987 days ago
The conventional wisdom these days is that declarative is better than imperative. WPF is a declarative GUI framework as is Apple's competitor. The theory is that there are enough cycles now to let the software decode HOW to do something and the user just says WHAT to do. This sounds like a good deal. The user gets to ignore half the problem. The issue I have with this is that what it really means is that the user loses control of half the solution. For things like WPF and such this may be a good trade-off. The people doing the coding are very bright and are likely to make fewer big mistakes than most of the users. But, there are those small mistakes that grate. Or more often those places where what you want to have happen the designers did not consider, or did not consider important enough. That is why OpenGL and DirectX will remain in business and will remain the system of choice for the most demanding applications. They are also easier to debug than WPF since you can ...
987 days ago
I was looking for a hosting company for a web project and ran accross Engine Yard when looking for Rails hosting companies. I was much impressed with their pre-sales support to get me setup and my project aligned with their system. Their technology stack is very impressive. Not for the casual project, but for a real project, this is a hosting company much worth checking out. Engine Yard
987 days ago
This is a project you need to check out if you are into Rails. They provide an AJAX aware UI for Rails controllers with a fair amount of customization available. In particular unlike the rails provided scaffolding, this produces UI that you can live with for non-customer facing pages. I would not use it for pages intended for customers to use, but for in-house people, and all those configuration or setup screens that every application ends up with, it is way more than adequate. Check out the project at ActiveScaffold
987 days ago
I know this is old news to some but Rails is wicked cool. Yes I had heard the hype and even seen a demo and played a bit with Ruby, but it taks a real project to make it really sink in. Being an old Smalltalk devotee I of course like Ruby as it is the closest thing to Smalltalk in general use. After using Rails for a while, I can say I am a convert. The ease of use of meta programming makes all the difference. While I have done lots of meta programming in Smalltalk and even some in Java (where you need to generate bytecode directly to get the same feel), the clear integration of it into the language is as influential as OO being built in rather than done with vtable pointers (manually). With Ruby there is no need to club the runtime or language over the head to get meta programming to work. It just works. Beyond Ruby goodness Rails uses that power in a very well structured and flexible manner. The architecture is elegant and simple, while providing all the power with none of ...
