Posts Archive

After reading Aslaks post on his upcoming conferences it is obvious to me that Stockholm is sorely lacking in the conference space.

Aslak mentions RubyFools in Copenhagen and Oslo, and Smidig 2008 in Oslo. RubyFools seems to be great, and I know that Smidig was awesome in 2007.

The only conference I can think of in Stockholm is JFokus, which I hear is very good but Java only. Looking to the whole of Sweden we have Øredev which I always has found too unfocused, and Expo-C which I cannot tell if they exist anymore.

Ola has released JtestR 0.1. It seems to b a great tool for those doing Java development. I can personally not imagine doing any development these days without RSpec.

Me and Peter Krantz just tried to get an iChat video chat going, just to test it out. We never got it going.

We forwarded a gazillion ports on our routers, turned off the firewalls on our laptops but to no avail.

The thing is, had we managed to get it working it would still have been way too hard to set up for any sort of reqular use. And how often do you have access to the router anyway?

I just read the following in a month old post on the RSpec list:

As someone who uses an IDE, I find dealing with multiple SCMs is a real pain, and one of the cool things about Ruby has been that (traditionally) nearly everything’s in Subversion

It might be that Rails will have hard time keeping up with new stuff, both technically and culturally, since it tied really close knots with everything that was cool 2005.

RSpec 1.1: “The RSpec Development Team is pleased as glug (that’s kind of like punch, but more festive) to announce RSpec-1.1.0.”

Woohoo! We’ve used RSpec since the 0.7-ies and I personally could not be happier with it. The RSpec community is really pushing the boundaries for testing/speccing frameworks and is now the standard for all others to follow.

(Via David Chelimsky)

I was happy to note that Dion Almaer commented on my blog post on Merb. Dion is one of my favorite bloggers/podcasters and I value what he writes highly.

But I disagree with him on this one. The problem with using Java for web application development was never one of too much choice. In fact, it was because of that choice that Java became a player in the server side market at all. Sun alone never had the answer to what was needed for server side development, instead the open source world stepped in and made incremental corrections.

I had to straighten up the CSS for our public website, and I thought of looking into YUI Grids as I had heard lots of good things about it. It took me less than two hours to completely redo the layout, and the the end result was a better design, less custom CSS and better browser portability. I am a convert.

They actually do say that, here in Sweden. In a brochure handed out at SIME07, Google provides a little glossary for the technically challenged, and to my amusement JavaScript is described as follows:

JavaScript - scripting language for those who are not programmers, in first hand intended for creating web pages.

The translation is mine. The original text in Swedish: “JavaScript - skriptspråk för de som inte är programmerare, som i första hand är avsett får att skapa webbsidor”

I have used Rails on a daily basis for almost a year now, and before that I was a night time hangaround. While I am definitely a happier programmer using Rails than anything built on Java, I still feel that it can get better.

First of all I want more things to be plugins. And really, they should not be plugins at all but gems instead.

Why plugins? We use RSpec instead of Test/Unit, HAML instead of erb and are seriously looking into JQuery instead of Prototype. And of course, we are using Mercurial instead of Subversion. All of this is of course possible to use in Rails, but a lot of things are sort of made for the default choice, such as generators generating tests, and plugins having the -x switch for Subversion. And I am pretty sure that this is the way DHH wants it.

DHH’s post about the Rails 2.0 is incredibly well written. It is almost as he is showing off a unknown past as a PR agent when he talks about Rails not supporting commercial databases out of the box:

But that doesn’t mean the commercial databases are left out in the cold. Rather, they’ve now been set free to have an independent release schedule from the main Rails distribution.

This sort of well formulated marketing has been known to render some sour remarks from the rest of the open source web framework world. My belief is though that when they ask themselves “Why are people so attracted to Rails, my framework of choice is just as good or even better”, sentences like the one above are probably a large part of the answer.