Head On

My 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.

Update: Josh Berkus says the the same thing

There is one thing that strikes me in the Sun MySQL thingy - what about Sun’s previous commitment to PostgreSQL, where they say stuff like: “PostgreSQL for Solaris 10 is the open source enterprise database platform of choice”?

Tim Bray comments on the deal and totally dismisses any alternatives:

MySQL, you know, in my experience, it, well, Just Works. Runs great on our hardware and OS. Well, OK, GNU/Linux too. What else is there? For databases, nothing that matters.

I strongly prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL, and I have previously used Sun as a reference for it. Perhaps no more.

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.

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.

I am subscriber of the Test Driven Development mailing list as well as the RSpec ones. One thing that strikes me continually is the lack of innovation and new ideas in the former one, as opposed to the flurry of brilliant ideas constantly coming out of the RSpec one. It seems to me that communities stagnate and that the people who once were the revolutionaries turn into keepers of their own revolutions ideas. The free thinkers become conservative.

Guy Kawasaki gave a brilliant keynote on the MySQL conference, talking about innovation. He said that the only way most people think about how to improve themselves is by using the tools they know more proficiently. No makers of horse carriages became car manufacturers. And the original TDD’ers are still talking about the same things they did five years ago. The revolution has moved on.

Lots of people have had problems with Ruby and MySQL. The ever so pragmatic Rails book links to a popular solution which involves installing the MySQL gem and specifying the path to the MySQL. This did not do the trick for me, and I’ve failed trying different alternatives after that. Today I came across PJ Hyett’s idea of installing Ruby-MySQL from source. It worked like a charm.

Eventum Issue / Bug Tracking System has to be the best kept secret in issue tracking. I might not get out as much as I should, but I had not heard of it until the other day.

I did spend some time the other day looking at Bugzilla, which we used to use in house before the days of JIRA, to see if they had made any improvements and fixed that god-awful search screen. (They hadn’t)

In the process, I came across Eventum by chance and since it is a MySQL product I figured it ought to be interesting and installed it on my laptop to give it a go.

The thing is, I really like it. It has the same power user feeling that Request Tracker has, but is more aimed at a development environment. We are happy JIRA customers at Lecando, but Mike and the guys could definitely pick up one or two things from Eventum. My favorite thing is that Eventum uses colored rows when listing issues to indicate the status of the issue, which really gives you a quick overview.

JIRA’s icons look nice, but they do not provide a good overview. Look at the ‘Roadmap’ screen to see what I mean.

I feel I just have to try Ruby on Rails, I mean everybody else is doing it and I don’t want to feel left out.

So I started setting it up on my X40 which runs Ubuntu. There is still no deb available for it, you have to use the Ruby Gems system to set it up. I dont know if this is good or bad - it seems like a Ruby CPAN and my feelings towards Perls CPAN are mixed. I once ended up with two Perls on a Red Hat box when using it to set up Request Tracker. Let’s hope Gems works better.

To start out I had to apt-get rdoc and libzlib-ruby. After that it is installed. Whohoo. What now?

Ok rails ~/work/rortest … Bang. Some dependency is missing. Let’s search Synaptic to see what could possibly make it tick.

libwebrick maybe? Nope.
libmysql-ruby? Nope.
eruby? No.
libdbi-mysql. Noo.
libwhatever-ruby. Nothing works.

Maybe there’s some info on their site? Hmm … there are instructions on how to install it on Debian unstable which involves apt-getting the all ruby libraries known to man - but who cares - let’s try that.

Whohoo! It works. Let’s see some of the Ruby love in the browser then - it is indeed there.

Ok. Now for the database tweaking. Why three databases? I guess I’l find out.

Yaml is really, really nice.

Ok, according to the site, all I have left is to develop my Rails application, so I guess that is what I will do. Wish me luck.

Update: There are now instructions for how to set up Rails on Ubuntu.