links for 2008-05-24
Saturday, May 24th, 2008-
Great comparison chart for lightbox libraries
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The heir to Haml?
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Jetty is my favorite Java web container
Tools, again
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Computer Swedens developer columnist Tobias Fjälling the other day answered the question “What should a good development environment include?”. (MÃ¥sten i en bra utvecklingsmiljö - Computer Sweden).
Tobias list:
- Auto-complete
- Refactoring
- Navigationsupport
- Extendability
- Speed
- Debugger
- Code templates
I find this to be spot on what Ola wrote about) the other day which I already quoted:
It’s interesting, many Java programmers talk so much about tools, but they never seem to think about their language as a tool.
Tobias seems to be a good guy, I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he forgot.
links for 2008-05-16
Friday, May 16th, 2008-
Loads of documentation for web developers
The Programming Language Is Your Most Powerful Tool
Thursday, May 15th, 2008Ola is so spot on with this one:
A New Hope: Polyglotism: “The one thing that I am totally sure if is that we need better tools. And the most important tool in my book is the language. It’s interesting, many Java programmers talk so much about tools, but they never seem to think about their language as a tool. For me, the language is what shapes my thinking, and thus it’s definitely much more important than which editor I’m using.”
I do not know how many discussions I have had with Java developers who questions Ruby et al. because there are no IDE’s with the same feature sets as those found in Java.
The Good Pragmatic Developers
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008Java in 2008: “These are people who aren’t religious and aren’t close-minded and just want to Get Shit Done. Oh, and they’ve already got a lot of it done and they aren’t interested in discarding that investment.”
(Via ongoing)
Things I Have Actually Used
Monday, March 31st, 2008Robby Russell is a constant source of information on Ruby and Rails, I have used his instruction on how to set up Rails and PostgreSQL on Mac a number of times. It is therefore fun to see that I have actually used 3 out of the 5 things he wants to know more about::
RSpec User Stories
We were very early adopters of this one, we started using it the same day it hit trunk in a useable form. Everyone should start using it today - I cannot speak highly enough of it. The only thing I miss is a Fit-style table approach to rules, but I have my own thoughts about that one.
Using Selenium with RSpec
We have used the now outdated spec/ui library at WeMind. Today we use RSpec Stories almost exclusively for acceptance testing. My position is to use Selenium only where you really need it, for example to test Javascript functionality.
JQuery
I have used it for the dynamic hiding of speaker info for Agila Sverige. Not at all enough to judge a library by, but it feels a lot sweeter than Prototype/RJS.
JSSpec (BDD for Javascript)
Yeah, I wanna know more about this as well.
Using the Google Charts API with Rails
Same here.
Other than that I would love to try out:
Google spidering, page caching and absolute links
Friday, March 14th, 2008We just deployed this weeks release of Somnklubb.se. Right after deploying I clicked through the site to see that everything seemed OK. After a while I noticed that all links referred to our site by IP-address. Why was that?
This site has been deployed weekly for a good nine months without any problems, so there had to be something new. We called Mathias at our most awesome hosting partner GlobalInn to see if he had made any changes to the server. He had not. We started diffing routes.rb et al, to see if we had by any chance tripped up anything.
The anchor tags containing the links were all generated by link_to using named routes - the _url version. We have done this out of bad habit, we should of course use _pathversion that generates relative url’s instead. But I did not want to change that right before a release, and I still wanted to know what caused the error.
Mathias and I discussed the different sources of errors. Finally it dawned on us: the pages are all page cached and the host name has to come from the incoming request. Meaning, if the first request to hit the page will create the cached page. If it accesses the site using the IP-address, all links will be cached using the IP address. But who uses the IP address? And what had changed since the last deploy?
Last week we started using Google Analytics for this site, and supposedly the Javascript on the page causes their spiders to start crawling fast enough to be the first one on the page after a redeploy. Using the IP address.
So the lesson learned is to use relative links, especially when page caching.
links for 2008-02-06
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008-
Handling code in prose
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Tool for kuler color themes
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Nice plugin for services, enables a higher level of modularization
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TuxPaint but Mac-smooth
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Really good search plugin for Safari
Java vs the JVM
Friday, February 1st, 2008Tim Bray on the JVM being the good part of Java:
“But the Java language just doesn’t seem like the interesting thing about Java, these days.”
I wish more Java programmers would agree to this. One of my observations at JFokus the other day was that a lot of people really like Java the language, and are going through hoops to implement their ideas in it.
Stephan Janssen has created a kick ass new version of parleys.com in Flex/Air, but he wants to redo it all in JavaFX script, just so that it is Java. Rickard Öbergs new framework for composite oriented programming could be useful, but in my opinion it introduces enough new concepts to qualify for a whole new language. Lipsticking on top of Java makes it feel verbose and clumsy. After a year of Ruby I have very little patience for Java interfaces.
(Via ongoing)
Jonathan Schwartz says Sun will continue to support PostgreSQL
Sunday, January 20th, 2008My suspicion that Sun will not continue to support PostgreSQL after purchasing MySQL was unfounded:
From Jonathan Schwartz blog::
What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?
It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.
Awesome.
Groovy and Ruby
Thursday, January 17th, 2008I cannot help myself from making a small comment on Rick Hightowers post on Groovy vs JRuby. In short he thinks Sun should support Groovy instead og JRuby, because the syntax is familiar to Java programmers.
To support his case he presents a chart showing language popularity according to job postings. And since Ruby is at the bottom and Java is on the top, Sun should support Groovy. Which by the way is not even on the chart.
One thing I did recognize was this:
Notice that between Java and Ruby/Python there is a wasteland of languages that you will not see running on the JVM in any near future. So if Sun wants to expand the developer base for the JVM (not Java the language), I believe they are making a very wise decision to support the largest languages available to them outside of Java.
Supporting Groovy would probably be popular among the already converted, but Sun has to appeal to new markets to expand the JVM usage. I believe that is what they are doing.
links for 2008-01-11
Friday, January 11th, 2008-
Program an app online in Javascript
Ola Bini: JtestR 0.1 released
Sunday, December 30th, 2007Ola 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.
Agile Sweden 2008
Sunday, December 30th, 2007After 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.
I guess I have no right complaining if I am not prepared to do anything about it. So, after Smidig 2007 in Oslo, we have had talks within the Agile Sweden network about running a similar conference in Stockholm this spring. And while this is no announcement by any means, I am putting pressure on myself to actually contribute to make it happen by speaking openly about it.
Look out for Agile Sweden 2008 this spring.
Choice Is Good
Thursday, December 13th, 2007I 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.
The same thing is happening to the Rails world. The core team cannot create a framework that is a one-size-fits-all. The initial Rails proposal is great for a large number of webapps, but it is other things around it like plugins and JRuby that is making Rails a viable choice for all.
My Java tools of choice was usually Tomcat/Jetty, FreeMarker, iBatis, WebWork tied together with Spring or PicoContainer. What I hated was having some frankensteinian-enterprise-architect-design-by-comittee-lets-not-be-different stack forced upon me with a fullblown J2EE server, EJB’s, Struts or the JSF monster, sprinkled with an Eclipse-only development environment. And I hope dearly that Rails development is not going the same way where people question you on your choice of tools and wonder why you are not using MySQL and TextMate like the rest.
There is one choice that I do not miss though - directory layout. I am truly happy every time I do not have to choose it.
Instead of not having to choose, the most important difference I’ve experienced is that Java as a language together with the Servlet/J2EE spec induces a lot of accidental complexity, which is almost non-existent in the Ruby/Rails world. It is that which enables the increased velocity many development teams experience when switching to Ruby.
Google Says JavaScript Is A Language For Non-Programmers
Monday, December 10th, 2007They 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 - skriptsprÃ¥k för de som inte är programmerare, som i första hand är avsett för att skapa webbsidor”
This is of course a mistake, and my guess is that mistakes like these are inevitable if you have local offices like the one is Stockholm without technical knowledge. I find it funny, but I wonder if Sergey and Larry would laugh if they were to find out?
Merb, Leaner And Meaner Than Rails
Saturday, December 8th, 2007I 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.
So, when 2.0 is now released, I see that the Rails community as a whole does not see the same problems as I do. If they did, they would have done more like the stuff above, instead of sexy migrations and ActiveResource.
This is where Merb becomes really interesting. I have looked at it before not understanding its value, but now I see a framework that does everything I want Rails to do. Gems as plugins and very agnostic about templating languages, Javascript frameworks and even ORM frameworks - almost a heresy in Rails. I will definitely think about using it instead of Rails in the future.
links for 2007-12-07
Friday, December 7th, 2007-
Seriously cool.
Distributed Version Control
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007I just read this article on distributed version control by Ben Collins-Sussman who is a lead developer behind Subversion. If I understand his arguments, he basically says that DVCS is better than centralized VCS, but you probably should not use one since 80% of all developers are too dumbfounded too understand VCS at all.
I am one of the pretentious, self-righteous and obnoxious fanboys of DVCS. And let me tell you this: the difference between using DVCS and Subversion is on par with the difference in programming in Ruby compared to Java. If you have made the switch you just do not want to go back.
And finally: We have taught our GUI-guy Martin to use Mercurial. He has limited experience of using VCS’s, but he grasps the difference between commit and push. My face is straight saying this.
