Coffee & Gems

Ahhh, good. Rails 1.2 RC1 is out and it supports Multibyte. That makes me happy: '€2.99'.first # => '€' truncate('€2.99', 2) # => '€2' Even more so because DHH finally acknowledges the fact that this was a major pain: it wasn’t as plug’n’play easy as you could have hoped (or perhaps even expected)

In this blog entry the author presents a answers to questions he sent to some great programmers. I found it interesting, especially DHH considers writing HTML "programming" (well, sort of) Peter Norvig (Research Director at Google) wants to learn Flash Shame, that Roy Fielding (of REST fame) did not answer.

Yikes! Just saw this article on Enterprise Ruby . Well, it's been said that you can program Fortran in any language. I'd like to ammend that with: you can re-create Java EE with any language.

After I had seen this post where it was announced that the next version of IntelliJ (still a GREAT IDE for Java) will support Rails. Well, now it's been released and there's no word about it . A search on the JetBrains site gives no hits for "Rails" either (not even as a plugin ). Very disapointing. Will have to stick with RADRails then. Or does any reader know if Rails for IntelliJ is still/already alive/available? UPDATE: Dmitry has provided a link for the plugin (see comments). Thanks, Dmitry! Given JetBrain's history with IDEs I am very much looking forward to giving this a try.

Yesterday, the Swiss rails group was founded in the Reithalle in Zurich. I was there and had quite some fun talking to other Rails and Ruby devotees. Check out rubyonrails.ch , where we start to get things going. UPDATE: some pics of the meeting on Flickr

I, like many others, have been plagued by the lack of Unicode support in Ruby and consequently in Rails. While I did not follow the discussion around it in great detail I stumbled over it again in an article on InfoQ . In here, DHH gets quoted as saying ...as Morten Christensen pointed out; shouldn’t 5 or more plugins for internationalization indicate quite clearly that the Rails community craves unified support implemented in the core? No, DHH answered, from the Core Team’s point of view, this means that people want to support and implement internationalization in a lot of different ways, and that there is no universal solution that will make everybody happy. Even inside the Core Team people can’t agree how it should be done. Although, DHH added, I can’t rule out that the 37signals needs internationalization, is the day that Rails get it. Quite frankly, this arrogance drives me up the wall. And more important, it proves that the people who argue that RoR is proprietary have a point....

Through an article on InfoQ I have come across a number of blog posts about DSLs ( domain specific languages ). It all starts with Joel (by now famous for his opinions on Ruby performance ;) ) who explains the rationale behind creating Wasabi, a DSL for his company's bug tracker. This software apparently has to run on VB and PHP. InfoQ also refers to the blog " discipline and punish " (what a name) in which the author argues that DSLs are flawed due to their (or rather their creator's) inability to adapt to change - well, that's what I gather from it at least. Personally, I am currently working for a company that has created its own DSL for describing user interfaces on mobile devices (we're not talking about simple XML, but rather a real language). These UIs need to run cross-platform (Symbian, MS Mobile, Java, etc) so the DSL really has to abstract the platform differences. So in essence, I really buy into Joel's argument that DSLs are about abstractio...