Legacy blog (2004–2016). This blog is no longer updated. For current content, visit DigitalHobbit's RPG Blog (tabletop RPGs) or GammaVibe (engineering & entrepreneurship).

YAML Editor Support

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 and readable that it really doesn't require any syntax highlighting....

September 15, 2005 · 1 min · 144 words · DigitalHobbit

YAML vs. XML

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....

September 14, 2005 · 4 min · 672 words · DigitalHobbit

Introducing Rails in your company

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....

September 11, 2005 · 1 min · 74 words · DigitalHobbit

Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson

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 was aiming for quick-n-clean, and it seems like he's succeeded....

September 5, 2005 · 1 min · 117 words · DigitalHobbit

Ruby for Java Programmers

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....

September 5, 2005 · 1 min · 196 words · DigitalHobbit