Archive for the 'Rails' Category

Software architects as management deadwood

Two interesting quotes from Dietrich Kappe:
So no, we don’t hire architects. We hire developers. In a small team, there is no room for management deadwood.
I agree completely. My view is that the title “Software architect” is a misnomer for what most architects in the software industry do, or at least what they should be doing. […]

Will Rails ever run on IronRuby?

I met Ola Bini at the local Geeknight the other day and we had a brief chat about platforms, Ruby and RDF among other things. Ola mentioned that he wasn’t sure that Rails wuld run on IronRuby - Microsoft’s implementation of Ruby for the CLR.
I have been following what John Lam has been writing about […]

Prism - web apps as desktop apps

When people started making applications available in the browser a number of interaction challenges appeared. How do you launch a web app compared to a desktop app? How do you prevent people from navigating away from your app? The Mozilla people have been hard t work with Prism - basically a customized version of Firefox, […]

When PHP makes sense

I have been looking into development frameworks for a web based software product. I want the product to be able to be installed on a variety of platforms, including Windows server with IIS. First I was looking at creating the app in ASP.NET and make it run under Mono. Unfortunately I can’t find an MVC framework for ASP.NET that works the way I want. Ruby on Rails has really lowered the threshold of what I can put up with in the form of configuration and learning curve. Damn you DHH and your rapid web framework:-)

Looking for ASP.NET MVC Frameworks…

I have been looking for an open source alternative to the default way of buildig web sites in ASP.NET with Visual Studio. After having build a couple of applications with Ruby on Rails it hard to go back to the Page Controller pattern that Microsoft introduced in ASP.NET. Coming back to the ASP.NET page event […]

Checking for Model Classes Before Using Them in Rails Migrations

If you are using model objects in migrations (e.g. for inserting data) you should make sure that the migration works even if that model class is removed. I discovered this when setting up a new development environment and running all migrations in an empty database.
Let’s say you have the following migration code:

class InsertCounties < ActiveRecord::Migration
[…]

Bringing Ruby to the .NET environment

Things are heating up in the Ruby-as-a-dotnet-language area. Martin Fowler voiced his concerns on Microsoft not being able to look at source code and therefore having trouble implementing Ruby properly. Microsoft, with John Lam in the cockpit, is implementting Ruby for the .net platform (if you have been reading my previous blog posts I predicted […]