Coffee & Gems

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

I signed the Agile Manifesto today because I believe that the directions given by the manifesto's principles are are necessary further advancement in our understanding how software development should work. Here's the principles: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan Sounds good, no? And my disclaimer to all this: Agile is not for every project I think. But even if you need to do e.g. RUP for whatever reason you should have look at Agile methods and maybe adapt parts of it.

Joel of Joel on Software fame has bashed Ruby performance on his blog . The outcry caused by this flamebait has been large as expected. Yet, out of the gut (without any benchmarks to back up my feelings) I thought he was probably right that Ruby is small. However, I found an interesting comment on the Smallthought blog : the author points out that Ruby's performance is slowed down by a naive implementation of the interpreter and points to a Smalltalk interpreter just OSSed by Sun . Now, if we combine this and Sun hiring the JRuny guys there is cause for hope to get a better Ruby interpreter in a short while.

InfoQ has an article on Sun hiring the JRuby developers and the implications of this step for Groovy/Grails. They quote Graeme Rocher, a lead developer of Grails, who (not too surprisingly) says that it will not have much impact. I beg to differ and here's why. When I became interested in latest enchilada of RAD tools like Rails, Grails, Trails and so on the two I had a real hard look at where Rails and Grails. What drew me to Grails was the fact that it was close to Java so that I could use the myriads of existing libraries out there and that I could deploy it in Tomcat. But the more feasible it becomes to deploy a Rails application on JRuby the less valid these two arguments will be. So why would anyone go for Grails these days? In Graeme Rocher's Blog he quotes the tight integration with Spring, Hibernate, etc. and that they lokk at integrating EJBs. This might be of interest to some developers, but for me this misses the point of why I became interested in Rails in the fir