The Viamentis Blog

The O’Reilly folks have finally gotten around to interviewing David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Surprisingly, he even refers to OpenACS, the web toolkit I worked with at my previous employer. He refers to it in the context of how he wants to avoid the fate that befell Zope and OpenACS. Simply put, he wants Rails not to be concerned with ‘business logic’ stuff and ‘infrastructure’ components like forums, blogs and whatnot. Seems like the guy did his homework. One of the reasons I left Azri is OpenACS - I never felt ‘at home’ with it. Just like PHP, it’s hard to maintain, very obscure to garner popular support (we all know communities are very important for OSS technologies). But to be fair, I learnt so much about the importance of databases in webapps due to OpenACS - simply because it was created by Philip Greenspun. His SQL for Web Nerds just rocks. I gotta thank OpenACS & Azri for that.

I know, I know… you all know that a good programmer has to be “lazy” in the right way - so lazy that he doesn’t want to do a task repetitively. He just writes a little script and be done with it. But this article goes into much depth… Simply put, good programmers are not afraid to ask dumb questions…

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-08-24-n14.html

I just read two excellent articles by Joel Spolsky which I wish I found earlier. He explains how good specs are essential, and why keeping them updated is a must. Actually, this is a series of 4 articles, every article is gold. I made up my mind to create meaningful specs for my next project. The next article is about how to maintain schedules properly. It has been an issue of major head-scratching for me, and Joel proposes a great way of doing specs. I’m gonna copy that too. This guy rocks!

Specs: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html

Schedules: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html

The popularity of Rails is making many people sit up and take notice about what RoR is doing right. One of Java web development heavyweights, Jason Hunter, wrote a very interesting article on how RoR is poised to eat into Java developer mindshare. And there’s a posting on the excellent lesscode.org about this, asking if java is a “sitting duck” now. Painful as it might seem, I would agree.