DigitalHobbit

The last time I mentioned the RDT (aka RubyEclipse) project about two months ago, I thought that development on this otherwise promising project had stalled. Since then I’ve started lurking on the RDT development mailing list, and I was happy to notice that the project appeared to be picking up speed again. The developers are [...]

I generally try to stay away from writing GUI applications and focus on server side development instead. Still, every once in a while I have an idea for a GUI tool that I’d like to build. My previous post on the upcoming Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby book prompted me to (once again) look into [...]

Dave Thomas just announced a new Pragmatic Bookshelf series called Pragmatic Fridays. I have no idea what inspired the name “Friday” in this context, but a Pragmatic Friday is a short (60 - 100 pages), low-cost ($7.50 - $10), and focussed book on a specific topic. The books are available for download in PDF form [...]

Here is a nice post on getting started with ActiveRecord migrations. I haven’t played with it yet, but this definitely looks very useful. On my current Rails project, I’ve been going back and forth between using MySQL and using SQLite (although I’m probably sticking with SQLite for now), and I’ve had to manually keep the [...]

Martin Fowler has posted a strong endorsement of the Ruby community on his Bliki. Robby has echoed similar sentiments on his Robby on Rails blog. I have not interacted with the Ruby community all that much, but everything I’ve seen so far has been very positive. I’m inclined to agree with Robby that that this [...]

I just came across Java Web Parts, a collection of open source, lightweight web components such as servlet filters, custom taglibs, utility classes etc. I still need to take a closer look at it, but it looks like there’s some useful functionality.

(via TheServerSide.com)

Opera Software has decided to offer the full version of their Opera browser (i.e. without ads) for free from now on. I don’t quite I understand how they are planning to make money, but they explain some of the reasons for making their browser free here.

I have used Opera for a while a couple of [...]

It looks like Google has launched another service without much fanfare. Gmail’s “New Features” list modestly advertises the new service as “Personalize the Google homepage”, but it looks pretty much like a full featured portal. You can choose which content to display on the home page. Available choices include Gmail (top N messages), weather, stocks, [...]

Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas (aka PragDave) has started a new series of articles about comparing Ruby to other languages.

The first article looks at one of the biggest perceived issues, performance. As usual Dave is pragmatic and points out that Ruby is not always the best choice. In most cases however, the relatively small linear performance [...]

As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about YAML, here are some links to add YAML support to your favorite editor. Unfortunately, I have been unable to hunt down YAML mode files for vim and emacs, although I saw a vim file mentioned a couple times. Perhaps this is because YAML itself is so lightweight [...]

I’m still (slowly) getting up to speed on Ruby and various associated libraries and frameworks. Tonight I spent some time looking into YAML. I always thought that this stood for “Yet Another Markup Language”, but apparently it actually stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”.

Essentially, YAML is a lightweight alternative to XML. As somebody who entered [...]

Google has just launched another beta service: Google Blog Search. It looks pretty good already, and for example searching for relevant phrases brought up the expected postings from my blog. There is no way to explicitly submit a blog to Google, and the key to getting your blog listed is to submit it to relevant [...]

In his blog posting titled “Is Rails Ready for Prime Time?”, Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers shares some interesting thoughts on how to introduce Rails in your company. He recognizes that Rails is not always the right solution, and some situations may very well benefit from using J2EE or other frameworks. In many situations [...]

O’Reilly Network has posted an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It’s an interesting read and covers some of the reasons for writing the Rails framework. Apparently David has done significant development with both PHP (which he calls quick-n-dirty), as well as Java (which he calls slow-n-clean). With Rails, he [...]

If you are a Java programmer and you’re interested in Ruby, you should read this presentation about 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby.

This blog entry also has some nice Ruby information for Java developers.

About the most dangerous thing about Ruby is how more elegant and less verbose it is. And this is [...]