peace on the web, too

Trying to catch-up with the sessions from JAOO Conference 2007, which I would have very much liked to attend but finally didn’t, I found very good write-ups from Søren Spelling Lund aka publicvoid.dk. Use this link for his conference reports: publicvoid.dk - Conference.

I liked the details he reports and also the personal thoughts on the matter. Also, as usual in this kind of conferences, details come to light from one speaker or another. He quotes from the Oren Eini and Hamilton Verissimo presentation on MonoRail:

It is easy to fall into the pit of success because MonoRail leads you in the direction of good design. Microsoft is working on something similar for the future and it should be about to be released in beta.

Now that is reaaaally interesting. And more:

It’s encouraging to me that Microsoft is working on something similar because that will garner the widespread support needed to grow a third part business around a web framework based on the MonoRail principles.

Very good news. Having watched for more than a year now the adventures of Ruby on Rails and his cousins like MonoRail, it can only be very interesting to see the take on a web framework based on the same principles from a big company like Microsoft (maybe CodeGear too? someday? pleaaaase?).

It seems clear that at least some of Rails ideas, it’s spirit for the least, are and will be used in a lot of projects and frameworks. Even the venerable desktop programming will profit from these principles, like the clean separation of layers, UI driven by the controller code, code generation, automation and not to forget the tests and specs in code.

PS This is my first post using Windows Live Writer, it works just fine, maybe it will encourage me to post more often;)

From the CodeGear’s CEO, Ben Smith:

I have been spending a bit of time with partners in the development world ranging from ex Softies to ex Borlanders to really get more perspective on our efforts in Delphi, around PHP, with Eclipse, and Ruby.
[link]

[Update]
CodeGear’s Michael Swindell, in a response on Mike Does Tech’s blog:

… But Ruby is different. Ruby as a language hasn’t yet taken off into the stratosphere, but it has more mindshare and great brains thinking about it today than any other up-n-coming language. It has the potential to be a very significant and with Rails it has the potential to go beyond public facing web apps and really be an alternative to Java or .NET in the Enterprise app world. With the “deregulation” and fragmentation of the Java world, and the constant demand for “an easier Java than Java”, RoR has a unique opportunity today. We do see Ruby and RoR in CodeGear’s future.

As you may already know, the Borland Developer Tools Group has been spin-off from Borland in latest 2006. The new company is called CodeGear and it sells IDEs like Delphi, C++Builder, JBuilder or C#Builder, formerly known as Borland IDEs.

From some time know there are rumors about new tools oriented to support dynamic and mostly web related languages, as PHP or Ruby.

If you like/use CodeGear tools and would like to see a Ruby or Rails tool from them, please consider filling a survey here: Ruby and Ruby on Rails survey.

At the end of the survey you will be able to apply for a Ruby tool field test ;)

I recently discovered Jimmy Nilsson’s weblog, I think that it was by searching the web on Eric Evans, Domain Driven Design etc. I am trying to understand how to begin a Delphi implementation of Specification domain pattern (Martin Fowler and Eric Evans).

Anyway, Jimmy Nilsson’s recent blog post, Post-agile struck a chord with me, as he grouped in the same article the things that interested me the most in the last year, year and a half or so: Domain Driven Design, Ruby and Rails, Behavior-Driven Development and Domain-Specific Languages. He also mentioned Intentional software, but I will leave that for the next year :)

What I really, really wanted to say is that I feel that the semantic (web or not) approach to the software development or domain design if you like is at least as important as the other items on the list. Maybe it isn’t or doesn’t seem as “agile” as the other ones, but I think that we’ll see more and more the influence the ontologies and their use on the development process itself.

If after a couple of years and projects what you accomplish is a semantic representation of your domain or domain patterns, collaboratively built, shared with customers and on which your working software is built (through BDD and DDD), you do follow the Agile manifesto, so building it starting today should be called agile too, right?

If you don’t believe me, read on to Danny Ayers’ Raw and then search “semantic agile” on Google.

Other links:

• Semantically-Enabled Knowledge Technologies
• Semantic Web starting points
• SAKE project

I saw recently the announce of the RailsDay2006 event. For those who are not aware of the last year’s edition, this is a 24 hours geek event taking place online and about Rails. The purpose is to allow teams of up to 3 Rails programmers to create a web app from scratch, in 24 hours. You can make plans and prepare ideas, docs etc. but no code prior to start.

I am tempted to try to participate, just for the fun of it. Lately I didn’t find the motivation or the time to advance in Rails, so an event like this could focus me for 24 hours on the thing. Too bad is a Saturday, but that’s it.

The only surviving app from the RailsDay 2005 edition seems to be YubNub. It is a simple and clever idea: the web’s command line. You can use and add commands to acces web content, from dictionaries to search engines, online games, translators etc. etc. etc. All packaged with Firefox extensions, Konfabulator widgets, Ajax homepages integration and a hot community. Cool stuff.

Updates: I just found a couple of other RailsDay2005 survivors:

• YubNub.org
• barguide.dk
• nasa.versionfest.com

A great (small) post from Obie Fernandez on writing about something you actually used.

Have you actually written a Ruby on Rails application of your own
yet? Meaning, a real, useful application, in order to see what these supposedly terrific productivity and happiness benefits are all about for yourself? Have you used any Ruby in your day-to-day work yet?

If your answer to the above questions is no, then please, please resist the temptation to evangelize about it. At best, you’ll come off kind of flat and uninspiring. At worst, you’ll give wrong, possibly misleading information. Reading and hearing about the benefits of Ruby and Rails is nothing compared to actually experiencing the benefits yourself. Make the jump, then tell us about it.

I guess this is the reason I don’t write much here lately ;)
This, and the fact that I didn’t work much in Rails lately, too tired, too difficult to do it alone, I don’t know. My photo album feels better, though, I finally fixed a bug I had - big images were sometimes cut - it was a RMagick related issue, must call GC.start  after reading an image (more here).

PS Maybe it is also because I (finally) started a blog in romanian (less technical) at http://escu.wordpress.com. No idea :)
PS2 I love the performancing extension, always use it to blog, but I just hate those slashes (///) it adds before my quotes and double-quotes :(

Technorati Tags: rails, rmagick, mapopescu, escu

In the RadRails blog an old idea has surfaced:

I’ve been tossing around this idea in my head and as I use RadRails more the need for a solution is clear. As you develop a rails application you constantly need to flip between view files and the controller where the actions reside. This is a point of lost productivity. Let’s fix it.

Wow. I mean just WOW! Man, sometimes it feels good to have been a Delphi developer for some time :) People! This feature exists from Delphi 1.0, this means since … 1995! Really, I am glad to see new, web, people coming to same ideas as those your favorite tool had since it’s beginnings. It just confirms the usability of this feature, it makes me feel like Rails and Delphi might belong to a family, in a way (a MVC frameworks family?). I saw recently some blog discussion about something similar regarding to Java/Eclipse and C#/VS.Net lacking the same feature.

In fact, the way I used Websnap until now is very similar to the templated approach of Rails. If only the Delphi community would not be this fatiguée, I feel Delphi didn’t say it’s last nor even first word (OK, maybe Webbroker was a good try) on the web development.

Finally I get to write a post about Delphi and Rails, at the same time.

Software Development>Press Room
CMP Media’s Software Development magazine today announced the finalists for this year’s Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards. The 89 finalists in 14 categories were chosen by a team of Software Development editors, columnists, and industry gurus.

I really, really enjoy the nominations of:
- Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas et al. (Books: Technical)
- Rails 1.0 (Web Development Tools)
- Borland Developer Studio 2006 (Development Environments)
- Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse (Design Tools and Modeling )

Agile Web Development with Rails is an excellent book which I can only recommend, even if you don’t work or project to work with Rails, even if you don’t do web development (yet)! It clearly shows out how a good tool/framework/idea can take life and grow.

About Rails, go check their website, is too much to say on a single line.

Borland Developer Studio 2006 or BDS2006 or Delphi 2006 seems to be a very good product (finally!) from Borland, and it includes a bunch of languages for 2 platforms (2,5 if you count the embrionary support for .Net Compact Framefork): Delphi and C++ for Win32, Delphi and C# for .Net 1.1. Asp.Net, Unit tests, refactorings, Live templates support and especially speed and stability can only make it a good competition to VS.NET or other tools.

Other nominations I find interesting or support:
- Google Maps API 2005 (Database Engines and Data Tools!)
- Eclipse SDK 3.1 (Development Environments)
- Fog Creek Copilot 1.2 (Utilities)
- Backbase Standard Edition 3.1 (Web Development Tools)

Wow, long time no post :) I was busy at work and had taken a pause in following all the hypes _du jour_ on the web.

Meantime, I managed to improve my rails photo album (see mapopescu.com index page). After a couple of tries and (finally) a successfull installation of fastcgi on my Win XP machine, I decided to focus on the code and speed of the application rather on its deployment.

So I got back on using webbrick (the default webserver installed by rails). It is single threaded and more suitable for development, but still…

For the code, at first it was kind of weird, I had a feeling of panick because the Ruby code was still a stranger to me. Even if I advanced on full speed (using my “Agile Ruby on Rails programming” guide) , the code was just too easy and it didn’t “felt” right. So I bought the “Programming Ruby” book from PragmaticProgrammers.com. Now it starts to lighten, I begin to understand some wierd things (like blocks) etc. After a week or so of studying, I began to see my code was not so clean and dandy, so I splitted some classes, added some code from the controller to the model. I still don’t understand exactly how a model “finds” another class, which is not in it’s controller, neither in its appplication controller. I guess it will come in time. I must be too used to the “unit” view of Delphi … oh well :)

Then I improved my RMagick code, put the thumbnails in the database (this was a great improvement on the overall speed). Today I found another speed hack, I added a secondary index on some photos fields which are searched very often and mainly before serving a page to the client. Another big push (and obvious too, doh!).

Now I am much more confident in Rails, the whole deployment adventures kind of discouraged me. There are some things not very clear. I tried to add caching on the images being sent to the client, using caches_page, and I got a lot of .html pages looking weird (I guess they contained the images). The problem was that they weren’t served so well to the clients … I had crashes, plenty of errors on the development.log etc. I was still using fastcgi, don’t know if this can be related. So I rolled back this change for now.

For the whole deployment adventures I think a smoother path for the newbies (on ruby, rails, but apache too) it would be great to have some kind of server ready to deploy, multi threaded if possible, I don’t know, kinf of webbrick but serving more ports, or a windows app (service?) calling multiple cgi instances, or the SCGI for rails implementation … Something IS needed.