Apple is to Ruby On Rails as Sun is to what?

February 28th, 2006 I see that apple have added a brief "intro tutorial":http://developer.apple.com/tools/rubyonrails.html to "RubyOnRails":http://www.rubyonrails.org. This proves what is quite apparent in the Rails community. Railers love Macs. It's quite obvious though, RubyOnRails development and Mac OS X go well together. The UNIX command line capabilites of Mac OS X work well as an environment to interact with a Rails application. So does the default command-line tools such as *ssh* and *svn*. But mainly its because Mac asthetics complement Web2.0 applications. And Railers are all about asthetics. So Apple need to take this ball and run with it. Become the _sugar daddy_ corporate backing for Rails. A job that Sun does for Java, without all the licensing revenue. So Apple ditch WebObjects and come over all RubyOnRails. First step make sure ruby, rails and lighttpd come ready installed with Mac OS X. Maybe a nice gems maintenance cocca application. The a Mac OS X Rails IDE, come on Apple buy "MacroMates":http://www.macromates.com you know you want to. And then redevelop the Mac site and store in Rails!

"We Eat What We Kill"

February 23rd, 2006 Is the funniest bit of sales talk i have ever heard from a vendor. It was a couple of years ago, and a sales director was referring to the fact they had no large backing or IPO money and needed to sustain on their own revenue. "You could say " and he did, "We eat what we kill" tosser. UPDATE: From Rich Marsh's "blog":hhttp://www.creative-resonance.com/blog/ "clientcopia":http://clientcopia.com/ client quotes. Classic.

Enterprise2.0

February 20th, 2006

So we know about Web2.0 and how it is/going to revolutionise the internet. But what about the company Enterprise, what does this mean to users in your organisation? to your IT team? to your extended enterprise, suppliers and consumers?

Currently the next-generation web has all been on customer focus and exploiting the “long tail” of small business. This is where it starts but it won’t be long before the next-generation web moves internally and we start talking Intranet2.0 and Enterprise2.0

After all what is IT except exposing company information to employees, customers and suppliers to deliver competitive advantage.

So what is Enterprise2.0 going to be about?

Well i’d hazard this. Enterprise2.0 will be about:

  1. Delivering all off the company information as addressable discoverable sources.
  2. Allow custom mash-ups of this information on a user-by-user basis
  3. Identity services will stretch across this information seamlessly
  4. Rich dynamic user interfaces for employees powered by Flash and AJAX
  5. Customised RSS feeds delivered to desktops
  6. Low integration price points delivered by extremely losely coupled services
  7. Custom business processes applications continuely developed in low-cost technology such as RoR accessing consolidated data services
  8. Unstructured information dissected by collaboration and social services such as tagging
  9. Data exposure of all employees thinking and analytic environment through eventing and blog integrations.

and probably everything i havn’t thought of.

I think the first step is the use of RSS in the Enterprise. Imagine all the contacts and leads in a CRM delivered to Outlook 12 and managed through SSE, it won’t matter if your CRM is internal or a hosted solution. The SSE/SLX exensions is going to be big for creating an integrated Enterprise2Desktop and someone will make a lot of money for someone creating a SSE-bus to existing Enterprise applications.

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Typo upgrade

February 20th, 2006 Well i managed an upgrade of Typo (after some migration horror, note: always run _rake migrate_ first....) and it seems to have fixed my technorati problems, but i had to ditch the lucid theme as it wasn't displaying articles through the permalink properly. I'll do my own theme at some point, it's just i'm rubbish at the designer stuff.

Rails FUD: It ain't all about the scaffolding

February 17th, 2006 Lot of FUD about Rails around at the moment, lot of FUD. This "article":http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.309321.8 seemed to whip up a little storm. First I thought it was Joel comment on Rails but it wasn't, just some guy anonymously posting on his forum. Somehow it got digged despite being nothing new in rant terms. A "reposte":http://zifus.blogspot.com/2006/02/regarding-rails-restrictions.html also got on to the front page of digg. Say What! Why is this news! Turns out it is, i think a lot of backlash is forming and sides are being taken. But there is truth in madness and although anonymous rails ranter was completely off base on some things he is right about others. So i may be massively behind rails, I’ll give an objective look at some of his points. h2. General Comments Mr Anonymous seemed to have a lot of problems with scaffolding. Lets face the truth here, scaffolding is a marketing sell. Sure it looks good in the videos but when it comes to developing applications, don't need it, don't want it. Auto generating code just isn't necessary with a framework as quick to develop on as Rails. I think DHH knows this too. The problem with this guy is that he is lead to believe Rails is all about the scaffolding and trying to use it as much as possible. I shall call this "the video delusion" h2. "1. IT TAKES THE RELATIONAL OUT OF RELATIONAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM" Nope not really, it just requires you specify exactly what you want from the relationship with other tables. Frankly auto determination might be a convention over configuration too far. There are many ways to user interface manage a relationship so why does anonymous want to bake one direct into the scaffolding. h2. RAILS DOESN'T PLAY WELL. WITH ANYONE. NOT EVEN ITSELF. So this just isnt true. You don't need to reboot if you change your database model. You just don't! Again with the scaffolding, stop using it and all your problems go away h2. 3. YOU CAN'T READ THE FACKING MANUAL BECAUSE THERE IS NO FACKING MANUAL. The documentation is bad, real real bad but hey its only just made version 1.0 I agree that the APIs are not enough and its hard to find exactly what you want and even the books feel out of date. Being a beginner to Rails is *hard* especially when you don't know Ruby. No one tells you that. You may get 10x productivity when you really know what you are doing, but there is learning to do first and you can't skip it. There is no one manual in one place, but there is a lot of information. Go Find! h2. 4. RAILS ATE MY DATA, OR AT LEAST STOOD IDLY BY WHILE MY DATA WAS EATEN This is a common problem in nearly all database orientated development. It's quite standard, dont' trust your database to do your validation for you. It's the applications job h2. 5. THE FIRST RULE OF RAILS IS: DO NOT TALK ABOUT RAILS' RULES! The suggestion here is to put the Rails rules front and centre to newbies. That is a great idea and should be done ASAP. In fact a newbie cheat sheet would be great. Until then check out this "one":http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/ruby-on-rails/ruby-on-rails-cheat-sheet/ or this "one":http://www.blainekendall.com/index.php/rubyonrailscheatsheet/ h2. 6. THERE'S MORE THAN ONE PLACE TO SAY IT Yeah I’ve come across this as well. Because Ruby effectively allows you to alter any class or module in any Ruby file that gets run (unlike Java) you can put this wherever you like. But its just a convention thing, you need to understand what each file does, when it gets loaded and in which environments. Then you can make a decision. Remember Rails is Good not necessarily Easy.

Rotten Apple

February 16th, 2006 The good news. Well they have upgraded my MacBookPro order from 1.87 GHZ to 2.0 GHZ "free of charge":http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/14/apple_macbook_pro_processor_boost/ although there is now a 2.16 GHZ version available so it won't be the fastest on offer. The bad news. They have put back the deliver by date to the 7th of March. Damn You Apple!! UPDATE: Its shipped!! Should arrive before the 24th!! nice one Apple

Summit: The Future of WebApps

February 14th, 2006 Last week I was at the Carson Workshops "Future of Web Apps Summit":http://www.carsonworkshops.com/summit/index.html. Its fantastic this kind of thing gets to London as it often seems we miss out on all the best talks to many thanks to Ryan and Gillian, please keep it up!! Had a great time, met up with lots of people i knew for many different places and got hideously drunk. Now I don't really go in for the whole Web2.0 thing. I'm a massive advocate for a lot of things it encompasses but i just hate bandwagons. I'm a bandwagon rustler. Nearly everyone is releasing big bold/rounded corner/large text/pastel colour sites and claiming they are next big thing. Its driving me nuts right now. I'm much much interested in how this is going to change business, both online and offline, new and old. It was great to see some speakers who knew what they were talking about. But it was a little disappointing that no one (except maybe Tom) didnt do big picture stuff and take a real punt on what the future would be like. For them the future was just like it is now in the web2.0 world, just more of it. So here is my speaker review in no particular order: Notes can be found "here":http://www.socialtext.net/webapps/index.cgi h2. Joshua Schachter: Delicious - Things we've learned Very disappointing, and nearly every one i had spoken to agreed. Joshua used the "Takahashi Method":http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/living_large_ta.html of presenting which is just few slides and big big bold text. But this is better for shorter presentations. Joghua was a bit rambling with little structure and kinda jumped to the detail while what the conference needed was a big conceptual kick-off. I also get the feeling Joshua is just one lucky bastard with a great idea, he implemented fantasticaly but his advice to others, don't market, just do a problem you need solving and don't worry about making money only really applies to the fastest of fast-mover advantage. h2. Cal Henderson: From web site to web application Cal was better, more lively presentation but was less on Building Flickr as to what a web2.0 application actually means. This was a good breakdown and while Joshua talked the same subject, Cal had better structure. Cal was using a cross between the "Kawasaki Method":http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/the_kawasaki_me.html with his top 10 and the "Godin Method":http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/the_godin_metho.html in style. h2. Tom Coates: Native to a web of data The best of the night. Tom's a great presenter. His presentation was on the concepts of data and web2.0 and how data level exposure can enhance your business. A really great presentation which can be found "here":http://www.plasticbag.org/files/native/. Tom also used a bit of the "Godin Method":http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/the_godin_metho.html but a lot of his own style. h2. David Heinemeier Hansson: Happy programming with Ruby on Rails Well David was preaching to the choir for me and i couldnt say i learnt anything new. I did hear people say they though DHH presentation was a bit of a marketing pitch, which is a share because i'm sure that it wasn't intended that way. DHH basically spent half his time talking about good versus evil coding and developer motivation and the rest showing why RoR good looks so good. He really didnt pull it off, i spent the next hour explaining more about RoR to people i was with. At least half the people there where non-devs and it would have been good for DHH to talk about what it would mean to them. h2. Shaun Inman: Ten reasons why you need to build an API Shuan Inman, from "Mint":http://www.haveamint.com/ shot his load quickly and came across as the most nervous. His presentation was straight out of the "Kawasaki Method":http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/the_kawasaki_me.html but at least he had time for questions and actually this was his best bit h2. Andrew Shorten: Flex from Adobe Well this was Adobe's sell, the reason they had paid for the thing. The chance to talk about Flex to a bunch of people who are obviously big Ajax fans. And it was a good intro especially to people who would never have noticed it otherwise. I even talked to some people who said they might look into it for some projects. Nice sell Adobe! h2. Ryan Carson: Building a web app on a budget Second best of the day behind Tom. Ryan's a great speaker and a great example of how to use "Keynote":http://www.apple.com/uk/iwork/keynote/ good looking but not distracting (thats Keynote, not Ryan). While a lot of what he said seems like common sense, i know of a lot of people who wouldn't think of it. Two of the guys i was with who had set up their own online business were like "preach it sister!" h2. Steffen Meschkat: Reality-Checking the AJAX Web Application Architecture Oh dear. I'm sure Steffen is a nice chap and he is very bright but this was terrible. At the point he started discussing the inner workings and problems with DOM for 12 minutes of his allocated 45, we made a break for it to hit the pub.

The Best Coffee in Soho, London

February 3rd, 2006 Non-tech related post but it is essential i say this now. Without a doubt the best coffee to be had in London, if not the UK, if not the world has to be "Flat Whites":http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=Hopkins+Street,+Westminster,+Greater+London,+W1&ll=51.512901,-0.134857&spn=0.009828,0.027122 in Soho. These guys just rock! The coffee just tastes out of this world, it gives Starbucks a great kicking. Not only that but the coffee actually looks like a work of art and the sandwichs are excellent. Its a coffee revolution