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musings of mark since 2001

A while back on one of the lists I belong to the talk was about Ruby on Rails and Model View Controller types of development environments. I spent a few days reading up on the subject, mostly concentrating on RoR, but a bit on the Eclipse IDE too as it came installed with this FC4 distro. Eclipse is great for Java types, but not something I want to do so it’s toast here.

That left RoR to play with, also pre-installed with Fedora Core 4 - well sort of. The basic Ruby engine is there, but for Rails there are a number of other programs and dependencies that need to go with it. Luckily Google brought up some good tutorials and I used what I needed to complete my installation.

It took a couple hours to get everything in place, really impressed with the lighttpd server, blazingly fast for this particular useage. After going through a couple of the tutorials for creating basic apps like bookmark or contact managers, I’ve found the hype around Ruby on Rails is correct in that to create a small, very basic application like above took all of ten or twenty minutes following the tutorials.

Which is impressive if you were going to sit down and type the 100 or so lines of PHP, (or whatever script you like), and spend an hour to recreate the same thing. In my smaller world though, it’s fastest to grab a script that I’ve already used and compartmentalized to my own liking out of my web toolbox and paste that in. With RoR you still need to create your own database schema so unless it’s something radically different than the gazillions of others out there already written, there isn’t any savings in that department.

There are what’s called “GEMS” for RoR, a collection of ready made pieces that mimic functions and other bits of programs I’ve already spent time collecting and customizing, and it’s as quick as cutting and pasting. But not really any faster for myself in the long run with all the other files and server tweaks you need to do to actually have something, at least for what my clients are asking for. None of them are looking for interfaces with DOOM maps, most of the other GEMS that are available can be had elsewhere. IOW, the ones that I would use are already available in a much, much smaller package than an IDE, and plunked down inside or amongst some other php it’s pretty obvious what it does and how it works to someone that has to follow me.

If you spent all day doing nothing but creating large applications and wanted to learn yet another language, then Ruby on Rails is probably for you. For someone like myself that needs to grab an appy here and there and mix it up with something else, keeping the library up to date is an easier and more flexible way of doing things. For instance, RoR does all of the database CRUD (create, read, update, delete) for you, but my own library holds classes that do the same and are easy enough to customize for a php’er - nothing exotic for the next guy to have to learn and the end result is way fewer files and directories to deal with.

RoR is nice software for those that can make the most of it, not for every web site set-up out there though. In my case where CMS’s are common, there is no real Ruby on Rails based CMS at this time and that’s a show stopper for me personally, but it was fun to play with for a few days and find out the hype is true if it’s a tool that matches your own development toolbox.

John Hargrave is just too funny…

It’s not good that Harper went to Afghanistan and gave a pep talk on March 13 to the people putting their lives on the line there. It was virtually word for word parroting the Bush administration’s war “talking points” while ending the speech with “God bless Canada” in the manner of the President of that theocracy to the south. Canada is a multi-cultural, multi-lingual country without a majority of christians; instead of being a melting pot into one homogeneous white bread we are known to attempt to celebrate and acknowledge the different cultures and religious beliefs to be found here.

Along with our neocon Prime Minister, some of the brass like Cliff Walker of the Corps of Commissionaires are saying not lowering the flag when soldiers die doing peace keeping work overseas is okay because we’re “We’re in a war“. Excuse me? What happened to our peaceful country? If we are there to war with the Taliban bad guys instead of try to change their mindset, there’s going to be a lot more Canadians killed. They have been there a lot longer than us and no reason to believe that they still won’t be there when we leave with a few less citizens than we came with.

War words are being added to the creeping corporatization and privatization of Ottawa and Victoria, and in keeping with the US style of government media control they have disallowed any media to be respectfully present when the soldiers are brought home and repatriated. No worries about anyone in the party not keeping to party line and “looking good” in the heat of the moment either. The politicians once carefully couched their words in language to make Canadians seem different than those to the south, but their words and actions are as if we were American sheep now, and that is certainly not a good thing.

One of the links I clicked on this morning led to the version that’s after Web 2.0. That’s right, get ready for Web 2.1 right around the corner and coming to a server near you! It’s actually a short funny take on AJAX, something not so new that has had some nice marketing push behind it lately and is bound to be abused with greater awareness of XMLHttpRequest.

AFAIK, the two most successful types of operating systems being used in the world today are originally based on the Unix and later Linux operating system kernel, or the Windows kernel and it’s registry system. Windows has become ubiquitous now for the desktop PC, but it missed out with it’s NT web server software and Apache and Linux took just a few years to gain almost 3/4 of the market for what to serve up web sites with. On the personal computer side of things, Mac OS X runs so well because it comes from a company that is in the business of selling really, really nice hardware like their computers are and Ipods. If you just want to buy the software, at under $100 it’s a third of WinXP’s $299 and because it is based on the FreeBSD flavour of Linux, you can download an image for it gratis if you prefer and start hacking away.

Because Jobs has close connections with the entertainment industry, they have become a sort of content pipeline for that as well, the software required to distribute it isn’t where the long term money is. That’s where I think the PC Mag article titled “Apple Needs to Make OS X Open-Source” came from. Which makes the post by linuxbobinux over at PC Magazine’s discussion forum hitting close to the mark: Now everyone can have a computer that not only slices, it dices too!

Windows runs better on Mac hardware, and Apple sells hardware not software so it makes a lot of sense that new computer purchasers will be looking a lot closer at the price difference between a new Windows with Vista and Aero, and see that the gap is getting pretty small. For me, the ultimate would be a new iMac which I would partition into three, with the other two being one with Linux for the programs, and one basic Windows for the corporate world. Windows Aero isn’t necessary when you’ve got Looking Glass for Linux - software with all the cool 3D stuff, and the smooth way Apple puts a computer together for one sleek package. For now, I just fake it on my desktop with an Mac style icon throbber and image in the same style as the expensive stuff sometimes.