We had various deployment problems, i'm sure that many people have managed to make it work, but we got about 2 days of trying to port in a medium-sized, high concurrent project, and we finally came to the conclusion that it's better to stay closer to the mainline c-based Ruby than diverge our project to JRuby and deal with the dangers of working on the bastard-project (when we talked to some of the guys at sun, back when we made the choice to give JRuby a try, there was only 3-4 paid employees working on it... it just felt too edgy for us, and we were looking to stabalize our project, not go down a lonely road of untested/unknown.... )
As they say, sometimes it's better the demon you know , than the ones you don't.
Disclaimer:
1. We have had a LOT more success with rails, than failure. And we're getting a LOT more done now than before when doing struts/JSP/JDBC style dev.
2. My lead developer wrote a book on Rails development for Oreilly, (rails handbook), he is leading our charge into Grails even having a substantial background in Ruby/Rails.
I'd never say I regret doing our projects in Ruby, nor do I feel like JRuby would of solved my problems. I'm happy with Grails, and it has well complimented our teams capabilities and experience. We write code to solve problems and generate revenue, we don't have the luxory of coding at a well funded public company, we pay our mortgages and car payments from code we write every week. Ruby has met the challenge for us, but it's silly not to explore our options to try and make our new projects even more robust and improve our development, and our current dilemma of ongoing maintenance.
I've been involved with rails pretty extensively now for a few years, and i've enjoyed the platform for the most part. A few projects we've launched have grown pretty complex, and we too have had some problems with the code management, but discipline seems to help and a steady peer review.
Ive been working with Java pretty much exclusively since the late 90's, with exception of the last few years which have been focused on Rails projects. I've recently been working with Grails (Grails.org) which is a Java based stack taking the great concepts from RoR platform.
As someone who has never worked with Java, I believe that Grails might not be as easy to pickup and learn, but as someone who has an extensive Java background, it's a serious breath of fresh air. For a large scale project, I MUCH prefer grails code management to rails approach. Obviously with my Java background, i'm partial to Grails.
On the note of deployed code, a few of our rails projects have grown to be pretty large. I've had to implement a LOT of hardware to handle the scaling of usage. We've been able to do a lot of improvements to the code, but compared to the speed and efficiency of Java (Yeah, I never thought i'd say that) I'm a little bit 'burnt' on rails.
Comparing something like Passenger on Apache to Glassfish or Tomcat is like getting out of a 2009 BMW 5 series and jumping into a 1991 Kia.
The first time in YEARS i have had run-away processes take down an entire server, I've migrated all of our servers to Xen servers because i got tired of driving to the datacenter 1-2x a week or making a remote hands call to reboot a server because a zealous process took things down. (Did I mention i bought a load balancer to manage the traffic, i'm doing on 10 machines what i used to do on 3 machines w/my java apps)..
I'm sure that there are folks that know Rails better than I do, we're a do-everything group (4 guys managing a LOT of code and servers), not a large IT shop by any stretch, but on one hand we've hit epic levels of productivity. We've gotten projects out fast, and some of them have done well. We've had other projects we assumed would do great, but ended up failing due to marketing miscalculations. The lesson I'd say i've learned with Rails, is it's better to get a 'good enough' product out the door and then figure out how to tighten it down later than not even make it to the race.
I'm hoping that i can bypass that compromise with Grails, but time will tell.:)
Either way , Rails absolutely has it's place in the Open Source server software stack world. In the end it's just a matter of remembering that if you are doing rails programming, you better be doing it with a Test-Driven development style, as large projects can get out of control.
I've not looked at RoR 3.0, but i'm hoping that they have implemented a Service-style implementation for business logic, rather than encouraging to have it thrown into the Models.
I had a simple tool that needed writing a few years ago, a engine that generated checks from mail-in rebates. It was a simple import process from a CSV and a daily print-job from our logistics room. That project was thrown together on a weekend and is still in use today, no problem no drama.
I could of written something in Java and put it on the web, and done PDF outputs, etc etc. but why? Access was a nice little tool that did EXACTLY what the problem required. A VB front end would of taken an extra day or two of time to get working and tested when i could copy a Access file to any computer running access and had a printer plugged into it and they were good to go.:)
Yup, i've been working in web-oriented programming shops since the late 90's and I have never had ANYONE actually use the gimp for anything.
We make use of hundreds of other open source tools, ranging from Java to now Ruby, IDE's, OS's, scripting, etc.... no gimp.
A few people here and there claim to use it, prefer it over photoshop, and good for them. Makes me wonder if they are even professional designers, and if so, if they have a job.
My hunch is no and no.:)
Doing design work in Gimp seems about as fun as doing Java programming in Emacs.
The reality is, we are free to chose with our Dollars which phone we want to buy. Nobody had a gun to my head when i signed a contract on my iPhone.
The reality of it is if i want an open platform, I'll go buy a open phone. At some point developer mindshare might shift towards the Android App Store, but there is no force at work with the app store other than free market control. As it makes financial sense for apple to open up their 'walled garden', they will do so. Until then to legislate what they can or can't sell, or how to control the nature of the content they accept or reject seems like a slippery slope, arguably just as evil as something as broad as the DMCA.
An infringement on a corporations freedom to operate their business is going to be an infringement on my personal freedoms.
We have anti-competitive laws, anti-price fixing laws, all sorts of regulations to promote fair competition and I don't see how this is even an issue.
Google knows that they can't play in Apples sandbox fairly, so what did they do? They are doing exactly what they should be doing and creating a competitive sandbox. They are going to leverage all their corporate offerings to entice the user to play in their sandbox instead. If you think that Google is creating the Android phone to be an open platform to liberate the people from a closed platform like iPhones and the sort, think again. There is a calculation that the mindshare of having people on android will yield more add revenue, and possibly corporate services (hosted apps, etc) than not.
If Android didn't mean $$ for Google, it would be canned faster than a middle-management position at Sun.
The fact that google has an incredible cloud-stack to put behind the Android phones and make it stupid-simple to make it all work together should make Apple VERY VERY nervous.
I expect to see some serious cloud offerings from apple in the near future to counter this juggernaut google, who has the iPhone square in their cross-hairs.
The stakes are -huge- for smart phone market share. Google understands that this is the next stage of their growth to maintain global search and adword marketshare they currently enjoy.
The king is dead, long live the king. Competition.
Yup, and I am sure if you were to put a polite notice on your ticket that you WILL be contacting your bank for a chargeback, they will be a bit more responsive.
Companies like Valve (Steam product) live and die by their chargeback rates. Most companies, if the charge backs are too high, they have to get a high-risk merchant or can lose the merchant altogether. Amex has almost NO chargeback tollerance with vendors, and if they don't cooperate with or fraud timely, they will indeed lose the merchant account. And not with the bank, but get black-balled by Amex or Visa.
In my experience the threat of charge back is often the best way to get your case escalated quickly up the support tiers.
About 4 months now, I was playing wow for a few years and just needed a change.
The universe is complex, but the training and progression system is unbelievable. I have friends int he service who are on duty for sometimes weeks at a time. They are progresssing at the exact same pace that the rest of us are that might play 3-4 nights a week. After about 6 months, you're competent with just about anything you want to do, and then further specialization allows for deeper access to ships and better equipment.
The difference i like between EVE and WoW, you don't really need to raid to get into a decent ship and get good equipment. Just about everyone has access to everything in the game. Just fly to Jita and buy what you're looking for:)
It's basic economics of supply and demand. There is no more "Greed" in the equation than that of the publishers selling paper books at $20, they have their margins and operating costs.
My guess is what your definition of greed is, "It's a toy that I can't justify for the price, though I might like to have it if it was cheaper".
"Further, I'll end with a categorical statement in order to offend people: Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction. IE 7, Opera, and Firefox are all pretty similar from a normal end-user perspective."
Now you sound like a generalizing fool.
A lot of us have pretty much eliminated ALL of our desktop applications, even work applications with web based products.
To assume that anyone that cares about the platform of their computer experience as 'internet addicted' is simply blindly generalizing, which I find not only distasteful with any generalization, but also ignorant.
$12k for 2TB of storage is hardly a small IT shop pricetag.
I'm not a OpenSolaris expert, but for under $600 you can build a 4 TB pooled ZFS server on relatively low cost hardware. Hell, even $1k you can get a nice rack mount with 4 1TB sata2 drives from Dell, throw opensolaris on it and your up and running.
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
My $.02 is everyone sees the real oppurtunity for growth is in the mobile market. It's not hard to see what apple has done with the iphone and Safari, it's simply peerless on the mobile space, as far as browsers go.
I'm sure this is the base for their work on their Android Platform, and establishing more development and market share for Webkit based browsers.
If it was only about the desktop, I'd be scratching my head wondering why they didn't go with Gecko, but it seems clear that Gecko is just too heavy for current generation of handhelds.
I was really wondering the same thing when Apple announced that they were using Webkit over Gecko when they first launch Safari, but now that their vision for the iphone has come to reality, it makes a lot more sense why they chose the platform they did. I just can't help but think that's exactly why google made a similar decision.
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
This is not a close source browser that Google is shipping (According to their blogs/information), anyone can fork it and run with what they like/dislike.
I for one am very excited at what this means to alternative (to Internet Explorer) browsers.
This isn't a shot fired at Firefox, it's aimed squarely at Redmond.
I started reading this book from the internet in 1999 when I started my career in programing Java. It was a great place to start, there might be better material out now but that's what gave me my jump start.
That phrase was taken from my brother who is a real-estate appraiser. He's told me that before and I guess it stuck, and honestly I've found it to be pretty true. But he does that line of work in Vegas and maybe that's how they roll there.:)
Moving 'up' isn't really the case for myself anymore, my house is big enough and quality isn't really my issue for my family size and needs. But moving on is an unfortunate and frequent reality in my field.
It's not an issue of Brick vs. Stucko, at least for me.
But to have stayed in the house I started in 15 years ago just isn't an option for me. I guess i'm a little more ambitious than that.
I find this comment from Rob incredibly ignorant. In my career Java played a -HUGE- role in enabling Linux in the enterprise. It's cemented itself as a first class citizen for server programing.
I'm sure back in the day Perl was a great way to write code, but I look at legacy perl code now and just cringe.
Having written Java code for 10-some years, and probably made me close to 1+ million dollars in salary income alone (not counting rev-share, one of our companies sold, etc.) over the years, I have VERY LITTLE to complain about when it comes to Java. As a matter of fact, it's provided an amazing life for not only me, but my small family.
When Rob spouts bullshit like "Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.", it reminds me of why I would never hire a language zealot at my company. Maybe if my company was purchased by a failed.COM and put onto life support, I'd be a little more sympathetic with a retarded language like Perl.
In the 10-some years I've been participating on Slashdot, I don't think anything quote so idiotic has ever come out of Rob's mouth.
Maybe he's needing to refill his anti-depressants.
I put a small server into our office, literally an old P3 with 256 megs of ram.
I installed Squid and Dans Guardian and the problem is solved.
I block everything at the firewall, unless it comes from that linux box or my workstation.
IT was anoying for about 2 weeks, we had different websites that I had to unblock to do jobs, but... killing Instant Messenger, killing web browsing, etc is saving us a TON of productivity and we've never had a single problem with crapware being installed, virus or worms on the workstations.
In any business, I think the first order is to get the internet under control, especially if your the one paying the bills and the paychecks. Their productivity has a bottom line on their own livelihood and job security, and in the end your doing everyone a favor.
Slashdot Mirror
We tried JRuby.
We had various deployment problems, i'm sure that many people have managed to make it work, but we got about 2 days of trying to port in a medium-sized, high concurrent project, and we finally came to the conclusion that it's better to stay closer to the mainline c-based Ruby than diverge our project to JRuby and deal with the dangers of working on the bastard-project (when we talked to some of the guys at sun, back when we made the choice to give JRuby a try, there was only 3-4 paid employees working on it... it just felt too edgy for us, and we were looking to stabalize our project, not go down a lonely road of untested/unknown.... )
As they say, sometimes it's better the demon you know , than the ones you don't.
Disclaimer:
1. We have had a LOT more success with rails, than failure. And we're getting a LOT more done now than before when doing struts/JSP/JDBC style dev.
2. My lead developer wrote a book on Rails development for Oreilly, (rails handbook), he is leading our charge into Grails even having a substantial background in Ruby/Rails.
I'd never say I regret doing our projects in Ruby, nor do I feel like JRuby would of solved my problems. I'm happy with Grails, and it has well complimented our teams capabilities and experience. We write code to solve problems and generate revenue, we don't have the luxory of coding at a well funded public company, we pay our mortgages and car payments from code we write every week. Ruby has met the challenge for us, but it's silly not to explore our options to try and make our new projects even more robust and improve our development, and our current dilemma of ongoing maintenance.
It's a double-edged sword.
I've been involved with rails pretty extensively now for a few years, and i've enjoyed the platform for the most part. A few projects we've launched have grown pretty complex, and we too have had some problems with the code management, but discipline seems to help and a steady peer review.
Ive been working with Java pretty much exclusively since the late 90's, with exception of the last few years which have been focused on Rails projects. I've recently been working with Grails (Grails.org) which is a Java based stack taking the great concepts from RoR platform.
As someone who has never worked with Java, I believe that Grails might not be as easy to pickup and learn, but as someone who has an extensive Java background, it's a serious breath of fresh air. For a large scale project, I MUCH prefer grails code management to rails approach. Obviously with my Java background, i'm partial to Grails.
On the note of deployed code, a few of our rails projects have grown to be pretty large. I've had to implement a LOT of hardware to handle the scaling of usage. We've been able to do a lot of improvements to the code, but compared to the speed and efficiency of Java (Yeah, I never thought i'd say that) I'm a little bit 'burnt' on rails.
Comparing something like Passenger on Apache to Glassfish or Tomcat is like getting out of a 2009 BMW 5 series and jumping into a 1991 Kia.
The first time in YEARS i have had run-away processes take down an entire server, I've migrated all of our servers to Xen servers because i got tired of driving to the datacenter 1-2x a week or making a remote hands call to reboot a server because a zealous process took things down. (Did I mention i bought a load balancer to manage the traffic, i'm doing on 10 machines what i used to do on 3 machines w/my java apps)..
I'm sure that there are folks that know Rails better than I do, we're a do-everything group (4 guys managing a LOT of code and servers), not a large IT shop by any stretch, but on one hand we've hit epic levels of productivity. We've gotten projects out fast, and some of them have done well. We've had other projects we assumed would do great, but ended up failing due to marketing miscalculations. The lesson I'd say i've learned with Rails, is it's better to get a 'good enough' product out the door and then figure out how to tighten it down later than not even make it to the race.
I'm hoping that i can bypass that compromise with Grails, but time will tell. :)
Either way , Rails absolutely has it's place in the Open Source server software stack world. In the end it's just a matter of remembering that if you are doing rails programming, you better be doing it with a Test-Driven development style, as large projects can get out of control.
I've not looked at RoR 3.0, but i'm hoping that they have implemented a Service-style implementation for business logic, rather than encouraging to have it thrown into the Models.
Yeah, but even Access has it's place.
I had a simple tool that needed writing a few years ago, a engine that generated checks from mail-in rebates. It was a simple import process from a CSV and a daily print-job from our logistics room. That project was thrown together on a weekend and is still in use today, no problem no drama.
I could of written something in Java and put it on the web, and done PDF outputs, etc etc. but why? Access was a nice little tool that did EXACTLY what the problem required. A VB front end would of taken an extra day or two of time to get working and tested when i could copy a Access file to any computer running access and had a printer plugged into it and they were good to go. :)
Yup, i've been working in web-oriented programming shops since the late 90's and I have never had ANYONE actually use the gimp for anything.
We make use of hundreds of other open source tools, ranging from Java to now Ruby, IDE's, OS's, scripting, etc. ... no gimp.
A few people here and there claim to use it, prefer it over photoshop, and good for them. Makes me wonder if they are even professional designers, and if so, if they have a job.
My hunch is no and no. :)
Doing design work in Gimp seems about as fun as doing Java programming in Emacs.
The reality is, we are free to chose with our Dollars which phone we want to buy. Nobody had a gun to my head when i signed a contract on my iPhone.
The reality of it is if i want an open platform, I'll go buy a open phone. At some point developer mindshare might shift towards the Android App Store, but there is no force at work with the app store other than free market control. As it makes financial sense for apple to open up their 'walled garden', they will do so. Until then to legislate what they can or can't sell, or how to control the nature of the content they accept or reject seems like a slippery slope, arguably just as evil as something as broad as the DMCA.
An infringement on a corporations freedom to operate their business is going to be an infringement on my personal freedoms.
We have anti-competitive laws, anti-price fixing laws, all sorts of regulations to promote fair competition and I don't see how this is even an issue.
Google knows that they can't play in Apples sandbox fairly, so what did they do? They are doing exactly what they should be doing and creating a competitive sandbox. They are going to leverage all their corporate offerings to entice the user to play in their sandbox instead. If you think that Google is creating the Android phone to be an open platform to liberate the people from a closed platform like iPhones and the sort, think again. There is a calculation that the mindshare of having people on android will yield more add revenue, and possibly corporate services (hosted apps, etc) than not.
If Android didn't mean $$ for Google, it would be canned faster than a middle-management position at Sun.
The fact that google has an incredible cloud-stack to put behind the Android phones and make it stupid-simple to make it all work together should make Apple VERY VERY nervous.
I expect to see some serious cloud offerings from apple in the near future to counter this juggernaut google, who has the iPhone square in their cross-hairs.
The stakes are -huge- for smart phone market share. Google understands that this is the next stage of their growth to maintain global search and adword marketshare they currently enjoy.
The king is dead, long live the king. Competition.
Yup, and I am sure if you were to put a polite notice on your ticket that you WILL be contacting your bank for a chargeback, they will be a bit more responsive.
Companies like Valve (Steam product) live and die by their chargeback rates. Most companies, if the charge backs are too high, they have to get a high-risk merchant or can lose the merchant altogether. Amex has almost NO chargeback tollerance with vendors, and if they don't cooperate with or fraud timely, they will indeed lose the merchant account. And not with the bank, but get black-balled by Amex or Visa.
In my experience the threat of charge back is often the best way to get your case escalated quickly up the support tiers.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
About 4 months now, I was playing wow for a few years and just needed a change.
The universe is complex, but the training and progression system is unbelievable. I have friends int he service who are on duty for sometimes weeks at a time. They are progresssing at the exact same pace that the rest of us are that might play 3-4 nights a week. After about 6 months, you're competent with just about anything you want to do, and then further specialization allows for deeper access to ships and better equipment.
The difference i like between EVE and WoW, you don't really need to raid to get into a decent ship and get good equipment. Just about everyone has access to everything in the game. Just fly to Jita and buy what you're looking for :)
Ridiculous Exhibit of Terminally Abused Retired Drives
Greed? How so?
It's basic economics of supply and demand. There is no more "Greed" in the equation than that of the publishers selling paper books at $20, they have their margins and operating costs.
My guess is what your definition of greed is, "It's a toy that I can't justify for the price, though I might like to have it if it was cheaper".
Sounds more like your crying 'sour grapes' to me.
You were making sense until you stated
"Further, I'll end with a categorical statement in order to offend people: Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction. IE 7, Opera, and Firefox are all pretty similar from a normal end-user perspective."
Now you sound like a generalizing fool.
A lot of us have pretty much eliminated ALL of our desktop applications, even work applications with web based products.
To assume that anyone that cares about the platform of their computer experience as 'internet addicted' is simply blindly generalizing, which I find not only distasteful with any generalization, but also ignorant.
I can't help but wonder if those same friends would play the Jar-Jar Binks race in a starwars MMO.
$12k for 2TB of storage is hardly a small IT shop pricetag.
I'm not a OpenSolaris expert, but for under $600 you can build a 4 TB pooled ZFS server on relatively low cost hardware. Hell, even $1k you can get a nice rack mount with 4 1TB sata2 drives from Dell, throw opensolaris on it and your up and running.
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
I picked it up, along with a bunch of friends, and we're all LOVING it. :)
They really hit this one out of the park IMHO, I've no doubt that they will do really well with this game.
I can't see myself ever going back to WoW.
Blast!
I guess South Asia is closer to Israel than North Asia. :) Keep digging!
This is an interesting observation. :)
My $.02 is everyone sees the real oppurtunity for growth is in the mobile market. It's not hard to see what apple has done with the iphone and Safari, it's simply peerless on the mobile space, as far as browsers go.
I'm sure this is the base for their work on their Android Platform, and establishing more development and market share for Webkit based browsers.
If it was only about the desktop, I'd be scratching my head wondering why they didn't go with Gecko, but it seems clear that Gecko is just too heavy for current generation of handhelds.
I was really wondering the same thing when Apple announced that they were using Webkit over Gecko when they first launch Safari, but now that their vision for the iphone has come to reality, it makes a lot more sense why they chose the platform they did. I just can't help but think that's exactly why google made a similar decision.
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
This is not a close source browser that Google is shipping (According to their blogs/information), anyone can fork it and run with what they like/dislike.
I for one am very excited at what this means to alternative (to Internet Explorer) browsers.
This isn't a shot fired at Firefox, it's aimed squarely at Redmond.
Yup, I agree 100%.
I started reading this book from the internet in 1999 when I started my career in programing Java. It was a great place to start, there might be better material out now but that's what gave me my jump start.
Has Sony they really had a big hit since original EQ?
Will they ever climb back to being a real competitor in the MMO market?
Bravo, well put. :)
That phrase was taken from my brother who is a real-estate appraiser. He's told me that before and I guess it stuck, and honestly I've found it to be pretty true. But he does that line of work in Vegas and maybe that's how they roll there. :)
Moving 'up' isn't really the case for myself anymore, my house is big enough and quality isn't really my issue for my family size and needs. But moving on is an unfortunate and frequent reality in my field.
It's not an issue of Brick vs. Stucko, at least for me.
But to have stayed in the house I started in 15 years ago just isn't an option for me. I guess i'm a little more ambitious than that.
Though not idealogically correct, it's probably where about 99% of us (that can even afford such an option) are sitting.
Don't forget too.
Who stays in their house for more than 5 years. In 5 years, most people moving up or moving on.
Utilities need to subsidize this shit, and that's when it will hit main stream.
Thanks for doing the math I was too lazy too do though. :)
Yeah,
I find this comment from Rob incredibly ignorant. In my career Java played a -HUGE- role in enabling Linux in the enterprise. It's cemented itself as a first class citizen for server programing.
I'm sure back in the day Perl was a great way to write code, but I look at legacy perl code now and just cringe.
Having written Java code for 10-some years, and probably made me close to 1+ million dollars in salary income alone (not counting rev-share, one of our companies sold, etc.) over the years, I have VERY LITTLE to complain about when it comes to Java. As a matter of fact, it's provided an amazing life for not only me, but my small family.
When Rob spouts bullshit like "Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.", it reminds me of why I would never hire a language zealot at my company. Maybe if my company was purchased by a failed .COM and put onto life support, I'd be a little more sympathetic with a retarded language like Perl.
In the 10-some years I've been participating on Slashdot, I don't think anything quote so idiotic has ever come out of Rob's mouth.
Maybe he's needing to refill his anti-depressants.
God, your making me feel like a n00b here.
I put a small server into our office, literally an old P3 with 256 megs of ram.
... killing Instant Messenger, killing web browsing, etc is saving us a TON of productivity and we've never had a single problem with crapware being installed, virus or worms on the workstations.
I installed Squid and Dans Guardian and the problem is solved.
I block everything at the firewall, unless it comes from that linux box or my workstation.
IT was anoying for about 2 weeks, we had different websites that I had to unblock to do jobs, but
In any business, I think the first order is to get the internet under control, especially if your the one paying the bills and the paychecks. Their productivity has a bottom line on their own livelihood and job security, and in the end your doing everyone a favor.