Gadgetopia

The Ascendancy of Ruby: Someone made an innocent MetaFilter post about how much momentum Ruby has these days. The comments -- both pro-Ruby and otherwise -- have been heated and entertaining. Some good ones: Ruby seems to be caught up in some sort of blogger-positive-feedback-loop, its practically viral marketing. There's ...

Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python: I always thought that a good way to gauge adoption of a language is by the amount of space its books occupy at the local Barnes and Noble. This is sort of the same thing. While I was looking at the data, though, I noticed ...

try ruby! (in your browser): An interactive Ruby shell in your browser. I tried it and it seems like it uses Ajax to round trip to a server, where it must run the commands. How does it maintain state between requests? You can type "help" for a short tutorial. This ...

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard): Rails will be preinstalled on the next version of the Apple OS. It's finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X. Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We've been working with Apple ...

Time warp for functional and unit testing: Here's a code snippet that shows just how fantastic a language Ruby truly is. In this snippet, you can extend a core class of Ruby ("Time") so that you can override what the "Now" function returns. This lets you "time warp" when you're ...

Mongrel: A Web server written in Ruby. Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI. It is framework agnostic and already supports Ruby On Rails, Og Nitro, and Camping ...

Rails: So what was the biggest shock of the Basecamp seminar? Finding out that it was written in Ruby. Yeah, that's right that Japanese language that you thought no one was using. They've apparently put together a Web development framework for it which they're releasing to open-source. Rails is ...

Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream: I don't know if I agree with this, but it's well-written and well-reasoned. The writer predicts that Rails will become a the Smalltalk or Lisp of this generation -- a highly advanced technology that still works great but never got popular. There is ...

One thing keeping me from completely jumping ship from PHP to Rails is the absense of a Markdown equivalent. Oh, wait...

Get ready for the Rails buzz to reach a fever pitch: Ruby on Rails has made a 1.0 release. I can't believe that its been only two years since I started working with Ruby. So much has happened since that its hard to think that I was actually doing PHP, ...

Are All Programming Languages The Same?: Python wins with Perl and Ruby close on its heels. Fair enough. Des Traynor wondered if this table was valid, so he performed a simple test: he provides examples of a tiny "read a file and print it to the console" app in Java, ...

One kink I ve recently noticed in a number of scripting languages geared towards producing web apps is the utter lack of support for XML Schema. I m surprised by this, since a good Schema validator can save a lot of code when used properly. For those who may not be familiar ...

Is Perl Still Relevant?: An interesting answer from Tim O'Reilly about whether or not he thinks Perl is still relevant. In terms of the competitive landscape among programming languages, in addition to PHP, Python has long been gaining on Perl. From about 1/6 the size of the Perl market when ...

Ruby on Rails chases simplicity in programming: CNet finally gets around to reporting on Rails. It's Hansson-worship at its most blatant, but still a good read. His goal with Ruby on Rails is not to create a sophisticated development framework that the engineers at Google or Amazon.com will flock to. ...

The 2003 OSDir.com Editor's Choice Awards in Open Source: Here's a great survey of all that is good in the open source world. Movable Type made the list for Perl (even though it's not technically open source), and I was surprised to see Ruby in there as a Perl alternative. ...

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE: Looks interesting. I couldn't find much in the way of screenshots, though. There's a video, but it's about how to import a project, not about actually using the app. RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal ...

Beast: An open source Rails forum in under 500 lines of code: The link text really says it all. Rick Olson and Josh Goebel have teamed up to produce Beast, a lightweight but well styled forum. Rails has sorely been lacking a good, well styled, open source forum, but Beast ...

O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf: This is part of Safari Online, of which I'm a member and big fan. Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to learn a new technology right now, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. You'll get early access ...

I was in Barnes and Noble tonight, and I noticed a few things. There were four books on the shelves having to do with Mambo and/or Joomla (I refuse to add the exclamation point). This is the first time I've seen books on those systems in my local store. I ...

ASP.Net on a Roll: O'Reilly indicates that ASP 2.0 is the hot technology these days. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of ...

A pro-PHP Rant: Harry Fuecks gives us a wonderful, glorious rant on why PHP is good, no matter how many beat-downs it takes -- and it's been beat down a lot lately. He starts with the simplicity and reliability... There are smallish sites I own / run, built on PHP, ...

Radiant CMS: The first true CMS for Ruby, it looks like. We've talked about RailFrog before, but I don't know whether that one ever got past the planning stages. Radiant has a demo, and it seems to be complete. Via CMS Report.

The definitive heatmap: Click heatmaps are generally commercial and very expensive. Here's a free one using Ruby. I'd be very interested to hear how this works. It looks like it has the somewhat huge limitation of not working on sites that are center-aligned. I can see how that would be ...

What Is Ruby on Rails: The article has been posted around quite a bit, but it's good so I'll reiterate here. This is a recap of all the things that make Rails awesome. This is not a technical introduction to the platform, but rather a look at all the features ...

Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks: There are a lot of PHP frameworks floating around these days. I think the Ruby on Rails legacy (besides a ton of great apps) will be that it got everyone talking about frameworks again. This article compares ten PHP frameworks. Seagull seems ...

YamlInFiveMinutes: I mentioned YAML a couple of times in a prior post, and while looking for a good link, I found this little tutorial. It's quite good, and, true to the title, it's short -- I think I got through it in four minutes. YAML is so much nicer than ...

'Virtual' visits for children of divorce: On the one hand, this is great. On the other hand, it's not. Divorce put David List and his 2-year-old daughter on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and he worried that she would soon forget him. She hasn't, though. List's divorce agreement guaranteed ...

Django | The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines: This framework has been around for a while, so maybe Rails is "Django for Ruby"? Developed and used over the past two years by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed from scratch to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of ...

A List Apart: ALA is shiny and new this morning. Looks pretty. New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system powered by Ruby on Rails. As the dog days of summer draw to a close, we present A List Apart 4.0. So buy a tee shirt already. I wonder ...

David Heinemeier Hansson has published the first release of Rails, his MVC implementation for Ruby. Rails is the system David developed to power BaseCamp, the 37 Signals project management app. David had previously released Active Record, his O-R mapping layer for Rails, which is the slickest method of database access ...

Parrot virtual machine: I found this in this post about the future of Perl 6. Parrot is something like Java s JVM or .Net s CLR, but for multiple, dynamic, open-source languages. Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. ...

JavaScriptTemplates: With all the Ajax and client-side stuff floating around these days, we really need things like this. The JST engine is written entirely in standard JavaScript. It supports a productive template markup syntax very much like FreeMarker, Velocity, Smarty. JST is a readable alternative to manually coded massive String ...

Mozilla, Microsoft reps argue over the future of web scripting: Interesting article on the future of JavaScript. Do you release a new version with incremental improvements, or do you scrap it in favor of something more robust like Python or Ruby. Critics like Microsoft and Yahoo argue that certain characteristics ...

PHP Becoming Mainstream: I've always been fascinating by an analysis of book sales as an indicator of language adoption. My "how much shelf space is it getting at Barnes and Noble" test correctly predicted the ascendance of both Python and Ruby. As such, I find this interesting. We've noticed that ...

Language Wars: Spolsky has a fun post on how to pick a language for your next Web app. [...] the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of ...

Battle of the blog: If you have no idea what the "Great RSS War of 2003" is all about, this article should explain about everything. "'The reason the core is frozen is to keep the developers from screwing with it. RSS is simple,' Winer said. 'They want to make it ...

geeXP: this may seem kind of silly, but there s probably some validity to it. geeXP is a new approach to managing your projects and tasks, in a fun way, that rewards you for making progress on your own projects. Think of it like a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG, where you ...

RoadMap - Sam Ruby's Wiki: This is a consortium of some of the A-list bloggers to standardize what a Web log is. They're trying to distill the basic elements of a blog, and develop a standard to which blogging tools can adhere. While that seems unrealistic in the vast blogging ...

Introducing Syncato: Since this thing is run using XML, this guy has written some fun XPath queries to prove his point: "A list of all pages I've ever linked to as XML," "The title of all posts made on August 14 as text," etc. "Syncato is the new Weblog system ...

A (CSS) Horse of a Different Color: The W3C is busy working on the CSS3 specification. This article has information on an interesting twist to colors: specifying them in HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) instead of the traditional RGB (Red, Green, Blue). I tooled around the What's New page at the ...

How to build a blog engine in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails: I haven't watched this all, but it's a video of the Rails guy showing you how to build a blogging platform on Rails in 15 minutes. It sounds like it was a conference presentation that he recorded. ...

Note: I got scammed here. See the comments. Ajax Sucks Most of the Time: Surprise -- he hates it. Ajax breaks the unified model of the Web and introduce a new way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. With ...

Syntactic sugar: I had heard this phrase quite a bit, but was never quite sure of the meaning. I had a hunch (and it turns out that it was right), but this is still an interesting discussion. Syntactic sugar gives the programmer (designer, in the case of specification computer languages) ...

Related to Joe's post about Microsoft's RSS bandwidth issues, I'm seeing a lot of talk about the blogosphere about an RFC from January 2002: RFC 3229, "Delta encoding in HTTP." The idea behind this RFC is to just send the deltas the changes between a current document and ...

RailFrog / CMS Ridin' on Rails: Here's the first Rails CMS...or not, actually. It's a plan for a CMS. There's apparently been nothing written, but they have a site and a logo and a name. I'm endeavoring to help jumpstart the development of an open-source CMS application, built using Ruby ...

Dive Into Python: I'll always post about a free book. I love free books. "Dive Into Python is a free Python book for experienced programmers. You can read the book online, or download it in a variety of formats. It is also available in multiple languages." Incidentally, Python and Zope ...

FoxServ Project: I'm surprised we haven't talked about FoxServ here before. FoxServ is an Apache / mySQL / PHP installer package for Windows. Unlike NuShpere or PHPTriad, FoxServ features the latest version of all included pacakges, user defined configuration during installation, PHP as a module, PEAR, and the Zend Optimizer. ...

We found a gem poking around on the corporate network the other day: a PDF of "The History of Programming Languages", a poster by O'Reilly that shows 50 programming languages and their timelines and interrelationships. Chris posted back in March about the progenitor of this chart, Éric Lévénez's Computer Languages ...

Law of Demeter: I just finished reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas. I didn't think the book was all that good (see below), but it did talk about a really great principle that I've seen articlulated numerous times before. The Law of Demeter (LoD) is a simple style rule ...

HTTP Error 410: Gone: I found this page today when searching for a refresher on the 410 status code. It means gone. Forever. Not just not found right now, but forever more. Gone, baby. We should use status code 410 more. As far as I can tell, it’s the forgotten ...

I have a friend who programs in .Net (I referred to him in a prior post). We'll call him "Trevor." Trevor and I have epic arguments about the superiority of our chosen platforms. I use open-source, "scripting" languages -- PHP and Ruby, mainly -- while Trevor develops in .Net. Trevor ...

I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like: SitePoint has a brutally accurate post about CMSs and making them run actual Web sites. The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and ...

Differences in the "standard" coding style from language to language frustrate me. I get irritated that I have to change styles to fit in with the accepted norms for different languages. Traditionally, some use variable names with_underscores, some MixedCase some mixedCase with the first word uncapitalized, some use tabs, some ...

What do you do with sites that need a single table of data updated? These are sites which are totally static, except for this one thing... For instance, we have a client for which we built a static site. But they have a page which lists all the locations where ...