Archive Fragments
Got the first 50 or so pages done, in the process of reviewing and carving the crap out at the moment. With a pencil and a print out. Reading parts of the narrative out loud to make sure they work.
Ruby on Rails
If you want to build a database-centric web app in 5 minutes flat … Get hold of a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails and dive right in. This is interesting because I’ve been holding back from it for ages, simpy because I was wary of spending energy on YAPF (Yet Another Programming Framework). Sun have apparently started putting money into it (probably because Oracle bought Zend of PHP fame). It just works and is secure. It’s what a framework should be – I hate the Java and M$ frameworks that make it hard to do anything without and IDE and 20 weeks training. Rails just works, and you don’t really need to know Ruby, although I think understanding what yield does would be an advantage.
I also love Ruby-esque things like
errors.add(:price,”should be at least 0.01”) if price.nil? || price < 0.01
Concise and clear. I also love the idea of having a series of migration objects that update your database and create test data.
I think it wo’t be long before we have Rails for J2EE, JRuby is already there and you can call out to underlying Java classes anyway. Looks useful and cheap. Testing and so on are built into the framework…