Coffee & Gems

Over the Christmas holidays I finally had time to read the excellent report " Scrum and XP from the Trenches ". In it Henrik Kniberg describes in great detail how his company has implemented Scrum. Most notable is that he does not spare out the trails and errors they encountered along the way and also describes the problematic areas. One of them: testing. In Scrum you produce a release every, say, 3 weeks. The term "release" IMO implies that the software is tested (otherwise it might be just another build). In order to get that done you will need to code test-driven (well, duh, it's agile after all). That means: unit tests and back box tests. The latter are often much harder to implement and a pain to set up (so save some time at the beginning of your project to get the infrastructure right). But even then you might find that there is a remaining part of your system which you need to test manually. And that will be the same repetitive process every three weeks. ...

It's almost the end of the year and a fun thing to do at that time is to predict what will happen next year. Actually, I read this list of predictions and thought, I'll give it a shot as well. I will try to keep it "positive", i.e. not mention what I think will not make it in 2007. So here we go: The uptake of RoR will continue. JRuby will make a diffenrence and will allow RoR to make its way into the enterprises. Similar frameworks in other dynamic languages will rather help RoR than take away from it (Django, Grails, etc) because they will only increase the overall interest in dynamic languages. REST will become mainstream in the sense that it will not be considered the poor little relative of SOAP anymore, but a viable alternative even for the enterprisey guys. Macs will continue to lead the pack in terms of innovation on the desktop. Location-based services have a chance to grow a lot. I expect a technology mish-mash of GPS, RFID, bar code readers on camera phone...

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