May 15, 2007
Ruby on Rails vs. Java
From the boys over at Rails Envy:
Posted by dottie at 12:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 19, 2007
The scaling rails brouhaha
There has been a *little* bit of heat directed DHH's way on comments he has made regarding the problems Twitter were having trying to scale their application. Mark Pilgrim's contribution is the funniest I've seen so far
DHH does seem to have a colossal ego. All the same, it's undeniable that he has initiated a framework that has legs and I am looking forward to where it goes in the near future (speed of development has been astounding)
However, I think the main problem with all of this is that DHH is not Linus Torvalds. Linus is a great leader. He knows when to ignore people, he knows when to say no and he is excellent at handling conflict, getting people talking, overcoming the issue and moving on to a brighter future for all.
As I said DHH is no Linus. That is the only problem here. Any technical issues can and will be overcome. In fact the Twitter issue was largely solved by a plugin developed by a member of the Rails community. Great!
All technical issues will be overcome in the same manner, I guarantee it.
What rails needs now is not more good developers or more work put into x, y or z (well, it does, but..), the area that is most lacing for rails is leadership. DHH seems to be the de-facto leader, but, he has not excelled in the post. I'm not saying he can't - he just hasn't yet. Probably due to the fact that he is more interested in getting on with his life - being a leader takes a lot of time.
If DHH doesn't rise to the occasion, or if someone in the Rails community doesn't see the problem and either call an 'election' (herding cats anyone?) or stage a bloodless coup, then I can see the success of Web2.0 companies based on Rails generating more and more high-profile conflict and divisiveness - maybe even a fork, which would be bad news (or maybe not...)
This can only result in FUD for those considering adoption, and crumble the patience and respect of those already in the community.
In conclusion, what I am saying is - shit or get off the pot, Dave!
Posted by dottie at 1:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 8, 2007
ActiveRecord - hallowed be thy name...
and blessed be the fruit of thy womb - db:migrate
Posted by dottie at 11:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 31, 2006
'Templates' is a reserved word in Rails
Feck it!
I had started coding up my CMS (slick! wait til you see it!) and had chosen to use a table in the DB schema called, innocently enough I thought, 'Templates' which of course held all the templates that the system would be using to create nicely formatted XHTML from the data stored in the DB.
I kept getting a weird error whenever I tried to add a new Template:
undefined method `assign_variables_from_controller' for ...
Head.Scratch. WTF?
Poked about a bit in the API, restarted WebBrick a few times and then decided to hit Google.
Templates is a reserved word huh?
OK
I rolled back all the migrations (how great are they? Very. Very very. Very very very). I decided to rename the 'Templates' table to 'JellyMoulds'. Then I thought I should be less flippant with the application that was meant to be making me my living in the coming months.
Clickety clik - off to dictionary.com - and a quick check in the Thesaurus.
I settled on 'Stencils'
I still might go back to 'JellyMoulds'
;)
So don't forget - TEMPLATES is a RESERVED WORD IN RAILS
Posted by dottie at 4:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 23, 2006
Ruby on Rails on Windows! Happy happy joy joy?
Maybe maybe!
Every couple of months I do a quick check to see the state of play with RoR.
The reason I am not now a competent Ruby on Rails developer is the fact that it just doesnt play nice with Windows (Apache + FCGI = heebie jeebies).
Finally, it look like there is a solution that will be usable in development and production - Mongrel!
A quick round-up of what needs to be done can be seen here and I have a bunch of other links to investigate.
Please, gods of the internt, let this be the holy grail I have been hoping for! Save me from the proprietary hell of ASP.NET!!
Posted by dottie at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2006
Ruby on Rails - shaky
Sadly, I stil lfind that RoR is not stable enough on Windows - or at least I dont have the time to make it so, which amounts to the same thing!
I'm not giving up on it - we're on a break!
Posted by dottie at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2006
Ruby on Rails
I have been keeping an eye on the developments with Ruby on Rails. Last year when I was looking at it there were too many issues on winodws to allow me to use it, most specifically not allowing FastCGI thus meaning any application I wrote would run dog slow on my Windows Server and I wasnt prepared to shell out more money for a Linux box.
I'm happy to say that the situation is sorted out. FastCGI now runs beautifully (at leats it does so on my development machine) with minimal configuration. Also I am happy with MySQL 5 which is a real MS SQL killer in my book - stored procedures anyone?
I am reading through Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby - both from the very wonderful and helpful Pragmatic Programmers
Once I have finished grokking some toy applications and drank some of the depth of the tool from the books I will be setting off to recode a major application that I shelved for a while and I will be tackling a few new ones with a view to providing easily cusotomisable services for clients.
The watchword for the next year for me is to keep things simple. Instead of writing complex CMS systems myself I am using MoveableType (OK, I couldnt resist writing some plugins for it....). Instead of jumping into learning ASP.NET with VB (yeuch - my brain aches in rememberance) I hope to be able to make my living from learning a clean platform like Rails with a lovely OO based language Ruby. Fantastic - the future looks bright!
Now all I need are some clients...
Posted by dottie at 4:13 PM
April 25, 2005
Ruby on Rails using SQL Server
If you are attempting to use MSSQL (that is Microsoft sql server) instead of MySQL there are two things you need to do.
First get the up to date ruby-dbi-all-x.x.xx.tar.gz (version 0.0.23 at time of writing..) from the Rubyforge page Ruby Forge DBI page. The instructions to install the ADO driver can be found on the Ruby on Rails community pages.
and second, and most important, get the patch for the add_limit_with_offset method/function (still not sure of the nomenclature for these things..) and cut and paste it into the sqlserver_adapter.rb file in x:\dev\Ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\activerecord-1.10.1\lib\active_record\connection_adapters\ directory.
Otherwise you will never get past the NoMethodError screen.
Posted by dottie at 12:02 AM