Ruby on rails has hit the long wanted 1.2.0 version. It can be installed using the command:

sudo gem install rails —source http://gems.rubyonrails.org —include-dependencies

Now lets hope that we get a feature lock until 2.0.

Camping is a great micro-framework from the legendary _why the lucky stiff. It's small size and simplicity give me even more enjoyment than when I work with Rails. But it hasn't gotten the recognition as a tool for companies as it deserves. In many ways Camping should have easier access into the hearts and minds of the system administrators and internal company coders then Rails has. A lot of what is written internally for a company is little tools for small changes here and there. Passwords need to be changed and the business software needs to export new usernames or change account informations automatically. Historically this has usually been done with perl cgi-bin scripts or even small PHP scripts. We could start using Ruby cgi-bin scrips from ground up but that wouldn't be very ruby'ish of us would it.

But you do run into a few problems when you start using Camping like that. Camping's conventions assume that you are writing something from the ground up. It assumes that you want to use sqlite but if you use mysql then it assumes that everything is in a single database. But things tend to be different when we write our little helper tools. We might want to build a logviewer to look at some logs in a mysql table and then we have to compare that to a user table in a totally different server. Luckily, this being ruby, that is easily fixable in an elegant way.

Post continues, click to read more...

Let me make this clear. I looooves the Ruby. But it has a HUGE problem. I feel this a lot as I'm not a programmer. I'm a system administrator for an ISP. Everyone that has ever done that job knows that it includes a fair bit of programming. Hundreds of parsers need to be written. Hundreds of converters. Tens of little cron jobs to do this and that. A bunch of webpages so the customer service can look up logs, reset passwords, delete records and so on. And my ISP has just started being a VoIP service as well so the number of coding doubles for that. But let's not kid ourselves. Ruby web applications have a HUGE deployment problem.

Post continues, click to read more...

Jamis has a nice article on how to Harness SQL. I personally love ActiveRecord but I agree that you should use AR as much as you can, but trying to force all your work into AR even though it may not fit is a mistake.

def instantiate
  list = TodoList.create(:name => name, :description => description)

  TodoItem.connection.insert <<-SQL, "Populating items"
    INSERT INTO todo_items (todo_list_id, content, position, created_at)
      SELECT #{list.id}, content, position, UTC_TIMESTAMP()
        FROM todo_item_templates
       WHERE todo_list_template_id = #{id}
  SQL

  list.todo_items.reset
  list
end

I have been looking a bit more on the webkit engine (the HTML engine that runs Safari and Dashboard). What really interests me is the quite impressive features on how it runs outside of normal browsing tasks. Dashboard widgets are basically HTML files and with a hack those can be run as normal software on the desktop. Another cool use of it is in the new Web Inspector feature in Safari. The nice thing about that tool is that it is itself written in html/css. So it is clear to me that you can write pretty impressive desktop tools using the webkit to display the UI.

What I would love is for someone more talented that me to write a RoR like framework using the webkit rendering engine. Allowing people the make simple desktop tools with the same ease as RoR enabled web development. Anyone up for the task?