Things I Have Actually Used

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Robby 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We have used the now outdated spec/ui library at WeMind.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:

  • Seaside - I have dabbled with it but nothing worth mentioning.
  • CouchDB

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »

Jonathan Schwartz says Sun will continue to support PostgreSQL

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

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

Posted in Software | No Comments »

Sun buys MySQL - what about PostgreSQL?

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

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”?

PostgreSQL for Solaris

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.

Posted in General, Software, Technology | 10 Comments »

links for 2007-09-14

Friday, September 14th, 2007

Posted in General | No Comments »

Rails, PostgreSQL and Time

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

I just noticed that the mapping between PostgreSQL’s Time Without TimeZone column type maps to Rubys standard Time class. Which gives the following behavior in script/console:

 
   >> t = TimeEntry.find(1)
   >> t.time
   => Sat Jan 01 23:00:00 +0100 2000
   >> t.time = Time.now
   => Wed May 09 19:02:07 +0200 2007
   >> t.save
   => true
   >> t = TimeEntry.find(1)
   >> t.time
   => Sat Jan 01 19:02:07 +0100 2000
 

Am I very anal to find this … sloppy?

Posted in Programming, Ruby | 2 Comments »

Is Sun making a comeback?

Wednesday, May 10th, 2006

I am seeing signs in the sky that Sun is making a comeback.

  • Textdrive is switching from FreeBSD to Solaris
  • Rumors that ZFS might be ported to Mac OS X
  • Tim Brays presence and statements on the RoR podcast from Canada on Rails
  • Sun makes smart moves like supporting PostgreSQL

And not one of them is related to Java.

Posted in General, Hardware, Software | 1 Comment »