Coffee & Gems

Just read this post from JRuby god Ola Bini which pointed to an older article by Paul Graham . Eloquently as ever, Paul explains his views that more clever guys use superior technology and therefore are likely to succeed in business (i.e. be more successful than the competition). During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a com...

Currently, I am in the finishing stages of a Flex 2 project (actually a pet project of mine and 2 buddies). We have chosen to use Cairngorm for the client-side architecture. Generally, I am quite happy with this choice because it saved us from having to re-invent the wheel and it works quite well for us. But. At the beginning of the project we felt that Cairngorm introduces too much bureaucracy into our client-side architecture. It was simply too heavy for our needs (more like J2EE in 2001 than Ruby on Rails in 2007). So we stripped out two parts that we thought are adding unnecessary complications: The most annoying bit for us were the value objects (VOs). We already have a model and we have an event object. We simply had no reason to create another object for transporting data. If we want to pass a model object to the business delegate we simply pass this model. I we want to pass some very simple set of variables (say, a string and an integer) we simply add that into the event. No n...

Recently, I have finished my first project using the Windows Presentation Foundation (which is, by the way, the best UI framework I ever worked with). One of the little things I had to accomplish was to integrate a Flash animation into a WPF UI . While there is some info on this on the Web I thought it might help if I post this C#-based example project for Visual Studio. For some background info I recommend Adam Nathan's " WPF Unleashed " which is an excellent book. btw: the backend was, of course, built on Rails. RESTFul and all that.

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.