> then I'd strongly recommend getting a separate > reference book just for Ruby by itself.
The Ruby Way is an excellent book for that, plus, the author, Hal Fulton, is a nice guy. And his RubyForge user account name is "hal9000", for which he gets additional points.
> This is a far more honorable course than piracy of MS, > which is what most other developing countries choose.
Well said indeed.
Re:How good is that code?
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nice... yup, metrics are nice, but don't let them rule.
PMD has a bunch of metrics stuff, including NPathComplexity (thanks to Jason Bennett for writing that one) and CyclomaticComplexity. All the "codesize" PMD rules are here.
Re:Business logic? Algorithms?
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 1
> aren't code reviews supposed to focus on the business logic implementation
I think that's exactly right - use tools like PMD to find nickle and dime things like certain null pointer exceptions, unused code, empty try blocks, etc. Let the code reviews be focused on things like "hey, we don't need all these accessors", "we should be using the business rule package here", "this is really more of a Map than a List" and that sort of thing.
The tools do the gruntwork and the people do the thinking... good times.
> So no, it is not ready for the desktop and > it will not be until MS and Macromedia decide so.
At least there's a Flash 9 player for Linux now, so that's nice. We couldn't do an indi Linux port until that happened... now I'm working away on it. Well, back to GtkWidget and all that...
> it's not a comparison of the databases that's the > reason, it's names, support contracts, insurance, > guarantees, someone to sue.
Yup, I bet you're right. Gives folks a warm fuzzy... even though the chances of actually winning a lawsuit against Oracle over some sort of database problem are approximately nil.
> Look, most of us want a database system we can use for our > own limited but still important purposes. We don't need a > lot of enterprise-level crud bogging us down.
Maybe someday when we get up to 100 TB or so we'll think about something else, but by then PostgreSQL will probably be capable of handling that load as well...
> Text (ascii, if you will), is the lowest > common denominator for people and computers.
So true. Although I'd even add the HTML Unicode escapes to that definition of text. I'm working on a JavaCC book right now and writing it in DocBook, and you can easily do Unicode characters with the hex encoding. For example, ü (or U+00FC) is ü. DocBook handles this just fine, the PDF output looks good, and so the book can use accented characters and such when appropriate.
> I don't think that Mr. Bezos would > recognize a Web 2.0 application
On the other hand, Amazon is doing a bunch of innovative things, like the Simple Storage Service (S3). We're using S3 for indi (with encryption, of course), and it's very, very handy; it keeps us from having to build out a big storage infrastructure.
There's also the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) they're doing. I was at a Rails Edge conference last week and James Duncan Davidson did a nifty presentation on deploying Rails apps. The really neat thing, though, was that he deployed it to an EC2 machine rather than a local directory or even a local VMWare instance. Very cool stuff.
> It's too bad Rails 1.2 wasn't released with mongrel
Well... maybe. I agree, Mongrel rocks, we use it for indi and it's quite solid.
But does Rails really need to depend on it? I think the current solution - using Webrick for development and then deploying to a full-up Apache+mod_proxy_balancer_Mongrel - works pretty well.
> I would have thought that multi-byte languages > would have been a big deal from the start.
Yup, they are. Ruby supports UTF-8, JIS, and various other multi-byte encodings. It just doesn't have support for all the Unicode encodings.
Keep in mind that other languages have to change as Unicode changes as well. For example, Java's char primitive is 16 bits, which for a while was enough to store all the Unicode characters. But with Unicode 3.1, supplementary characters can be 21 bits. That's why Java 1.5 introduced a bunch of new Character methods that accept an int, not a char.
> Most of us have seen more product the never > made it to market than have made it
Yup. This is where it's handy to write some open source code, some articles, or a book or two on the side. Then you have something you can publicly show after a year of working on a project that gets buried for some budgetary reason.
...on this sort of thing, Security Now. They had a good explanation last year of all the things the Sony "rootkit" did, like hiding files with the prefix "$sys$". The podcasts are pretty short (20 mins), definitely worth a listen to ease your morning commute.
> Flash is a proprietary software app that uses > proprietary protocols that are becoming ubiquitous on the internet.
But it's slowly opening up, and there are some good frameworks out there for it, like ActionStep. ActionStep is good enough to support building a desktop application. And MTASC is a great open source Flash compiler.
Hm. Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass it on. I guess we're hoping that the movies provide good descriptions of what indi does (secure comms, etc), but maybe some sort of summary page could be added...
Slashdot Mirror
> then I'd strongly recommend getting a separate
> reference book just for Ruby by itself.
The Ruby Way is an excellent book for that, plus, the author, Hal Fulton, is a nice guy. And his RubyForge user account name is "hal9000", for which he gets additional points.
> Your life will incorporate a striking amount of /dev/random
> despite your best intentions otherwise.
So true. As Shakespeare said, "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."
> Add to that the economic muscle of Venezuela, as well
> as Chavez's almost dictatorial resolve to make things work
With Chavez shutting down the opposition press, we certainly won't hear any criticism of him from within his country...
> This is a far more honorable course than piracy of MS,
> which is what most other developing countries choose.
Well said indeed.
Nice... yup, metrics are nice, but don't let them rule.
PMD has a bunch of metrics stuff, including NPathComplexity (thanks to Jason Bennett for writing that one) and CyclomaticComplexity. All the "codesize" PMD rules are here.
> aren't code reviews supposed to focus on the business logic implementation
I think that's exactly right - use tools like PMD to find nickle and dime things like certain null pointer exceptions, unused code, empty try blocks, etc. Let the code reviews be focused on things like "hey, we don't need all these accessors", "we should be using the business rule package here", "this is really more of a Map than a List" and that sort of thing.
The tools do the gruntwork and the people do the thinking... good times.
> So no, it is not ready for the desktop and
> it will not be until MS and Macromedia decide so.
At least there's a Flash 9 player for Linux now, so that's nice. We couldn't do an indi Linux port until that happened... now I'm working away on it. Well, back to GtkWidget and all that...
> Don't worry, our search engine can read your email, too.
> Love,
> Google.
Just one more reason to use indi for the important stuff.
> it's not a comparison of the databases that's the
> reason, it's names, support contracts, insurance,
> guarantees, someone to sue.
Yup, I bet you're right. Gives folks a warm fuzzy... even though the chances of actually winning a lawsuit against Oracle over some sort of database problem are approximately nil.
> Look, most of us want a database system we can use for our
> own limited but still important purposes. We don't need a
> lot of enterprise-level crud bogging us down.
So true. I'm running a small database (only 20 million records), and PostgreSQL is more than sufficient. We use it in production, too, and it's quite solid.
Maybe someday when we get up to 100 TB or so we'll think about something else, but by then PostgreSQL will probably be capable of handling that load as well...
> Text (ascii, if you will), is the lowest
> common denominator for people and computers.
So true. Although I'd even add the HTML Unicode escapes to that definition of text. I'm working on a JavaCC book right now and writing it in DocBook, and you can easily do Unicode characters with the hex encoding. For example, ü (or U+00FC) is ü. DocBook handles this just fine, the PDF output looks good, and so the book can use accented characters and such when appropriate.
> I don't think that Mr. Bezos would
> recognize a Web 2.0 application
On the other hand, Amazon is doing a bunch of innovative things, like the Simple Storage Service (S3). We're using S3 for indi (with encryption, of course), and it's very, very handy; it keeps us from having to build out a big storage infrastructure.
There's also the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) they're doing. I was at a Rails Edge conference last week and James Duncan Davidson did a nifty presentation on deploying Rails apps. The really neat thing, though, was that he deployed it to an EC2 machine rather than a local directory or even a local VMWare instance. Very cool stuff.
> Do most SWF site developers take
> visitors on dial-up Internet connections
Here's a better place for Flash: as the UI for a desktop app. getindi!
....for the important stuff, use indi. And yes, I'm working on the Linux port...
> If it doesn't support UTF-EBCDIC and UTF-9, it's no good to me
Yeah, and what about UTF16LE? C'mon!!
> It's very unwise to use a hosted-server solution to store
> confidential or private data unless it's encrypted
> and you hold the only keys
And it's not a bad idea to send such documents over an encrypted transport like indi rather than via unsecured email.
> It's too bad Rails 1.2 wasn't released with mongrel
Well... maybe. I agree, Mongrel rocks, we use it for indi and it's quite solid.
But does Rails really need to depend on it? I think the current solution - using Webrick for development and then deploying to a full-up Apache+mod_proxy_balancer_Mongrel - works pretty well.
> I would have thought that multi-byte languages
> would have been a big deal from the start.
Yup, they are. Ruby supports UTF-8, JIS, and various other multi-byte encodings. It just doesn't have support for all the Unicode encodings.
Keep in mind that other languages have to change as Unicode changes as well. For example, Java's char primitive is 16 bits, which for a while was enough to store all the Unicode characters. But with Unicode 3.1, supplementary characters can be 21 bits. That's why Java 1.5 introduced a bunch of new Character methods that accept an int, not a char.
> To the contrary, the websites a programmer
> can create with Rails are very worthwhile.
I should add - it's working very well for us (getindi!), and there's a lot more to our site than the glittery front end.
> All it seems to do is offer a way to do very similar
> and simplistic web apps without any real-world functionality.
You may want to look closer; it offers ways to do very complex web apps with lots of real-world functionality.
> I also wonder about the performance and memory profile; seems
> that the way it handles databases is exactly what DBA's hate to see.
In practice, ActiveRecord works out very well.
> none of the websites it can create is worthwhile.
To the contrary, the websites a programmer can create with Rails are very worthwhile.
It's getting installed at a furious rate... we're doing around a gem a second now.
> Most of us have seen more product the never
> made it to market than have made it
Yup. This is where it's handy to write some open source code, some articles, or a book or two on the side. Then you have something you can publicly show after a year of working on a project that gets buried for some budgetary reason.
...on this sort of thing, Security Now. They had a good explanation last year of all the things the Sony "rootkit" did, like hiding files with the prefix "$sys$". The podcasts are pretty short (20 mins), definitely worth a listen to ease your morning commute.
Also, getindi!
> Flash is a proprietary software app that uses
> proprietary protocols that are becoming ubiquitous on the internet.
But it's slowly opening up, and there are some good frameworks out there for it, like ActionStep. ActionStep is good enough to support building a desktop application. And MTASC is a great open source Flash compiler.
...now I can get back to work on the Linux port of indi. It's one of the few Flash desktop apps out there, and it's a shame not to have it on Linux.
Besides, it'd be a waste of all that code I wrote for the Evolution extension!
> What a poorly-designed website (indi).
Hm. Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass it on. I guess we're hoping that the movies provide good descriptions of what indi does (secure comms, etc), but maybe some sort of summary page could be added...