Curious About Everything
Wow. This is cool. Here’s a nice article called Motherhood and Apple Pie by Ryan Tomayko on lesscode.org. Though the article rephrases mostly Tim Benners-Lee’s Principles of Design, it led me across some very interesting articles - which led me to read some long-forgotten Paul Graham’s articles. It always surprises me how much sense Paul makes, though he has some detractors. A must read!
Wow. This is truly is a great time to be a web developer. I see very promising, agile web frameworks taking the centerstage. It seems so recently that I’m so excited about Spring Framework. Now Ruby On Rails has caught my attention too. The best thing I like about Spring is testability. Coming from Struts and the pain of using StrutsTestCase and EasyMock, Spring feels well, refreshing. I can test any method, even in SpringMVC without bothering about mocking (of course, there are built-in mocks like MockHttpServletRequest which take away half the pain). Spring WebFlow seems very interesting too, though I didn’t get a chance to work on it yet.
But… I always felt J2EE suffered from too much of configuration costs. There is simply no way a newbie can sit and learn JSP/Servlets easily. They have to figure out how to setup Tomcat, the arcane web-app structure and add Java’s verbosity to it. I really wished I could use a scripting-like language. Python was a candidate, but there are no real decent web frameworks in Python (atleast, nothing that I can learn easily by sitting with a book). So Ruby on Rails looks very promising. I haven’t seen the movie the first time around, since I didn’t have MPlayer on my Debian box. I recently installed it, and was surprised at the simplicity of creating a webapp. So much functionality comes out of the box that it’s amazing. And it was shortly followed by a new Rails Movie. Which was even more convincing. So I’m learning Ruby fast so that I can play with it. There goes another convert to the RoR religion!
I’ve found these wonderful posts from two entrepreneurs. They should know, coz they’ve been there. Precisely what I’ve been thinking all these days. When I actually provide an off-line presence for Viamentis, very little of the money will go into buying software/hardware. I think I need to get things going faster. But I’m still waiting for things to fall into place at work. Eagerly waiting to get going. Anyways, here are the links:
http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/06/its_a_great_tim.html
http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/000210.html