Several months back, there was somewhat of an uproar in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities when it was revealed that after two years of effort, the CD Baby Web site was abandoning their Ruby on Rails rewrite. The CD Baby site was reimplemented in mere months after returning to the use of PHP. This past week, I have been working with another company that is in a very similar situation.
As most people involved with Web development know, Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released on December 7. There was some discussion about the release on Slashdot, where I noticed some interesting comments regarding scalability in the age of Ruby on Rails.
During the early 1990s, a number of developers had the opportunity to use a NeXT system. Of those people, some were lucky enough to get to actually develop applications for such systems. NeXT brought us what was essentially a revolution at the time. Objective-C began to truly make Smalltalk-style OO accessible and practical. Their well-architectured class libraries were a real masterpiece, especially compared to the cobbled-together utility libraries used in many existing C libraries. And their UI was, of course, superb.
GIMP 2.4 was recently released. Although I do very little image manipulation, GIMP is one of the more widely used open source applications, thus I like to keep up to date with its developments.
One of the first things I went to check out after reading of the release was the screenshots section of their web page. I have to say, it was a very disappointing experience.
Earlier this week I had a very surprising and unexpected Haskell encounter! It started when a fairly large furniture shop in the area called me in to do some work on some of their intranet software.
They wanted some functionality added to their existing Web-based purchasing system. They’d mentioned that it was CGI-based, so I was thinking it was comprised of Perl or Python scripts. However, I was quite wrong! After getting access to the source code of their CGI scripts, I noticed immediately that they were all written in Haskell.
Scott Rosenberg recently wrote about how it appears to take an AJAX-based Web application about five years to mature. The examples he gives include the new Yahoo! Mail interface, as well as the new Bloglines design. But I don’t think he’s looking far enough into the situation.
I’m a staunch supporter of putting old, but working, computers to good use again. Personally, I have repurposed numerous systems back into production after they were deemed to be too old, and replaced with newer hardware. One of my favourite tools for enabling this is NetBSD. As described on the NetBSD Web site, “NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from large-scale server systems to powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.”
Earlier today I witnessed the wasteful nature of pointless JavaScript effects first-hand at the Blogger main page. The effect in question is visible under the “BLOGS UPDATED AT …” text immediately under the Blogger logo. In short, the effect involves the title of a recently-updated blog fading away every second or so, to be replaced with the title of another blog. So as can clearly be seen, it’s not essential in any way. It’s completely cosmetic, although it doesn’t even look particularly good.
Thanks to the Agile Ajax blog, I’ve learned about Remember The Milk. Essentially, it’s an online service for managing a to-do list. It apparently integrates with a variety of other services, including Gmail, ICQ, MSN, Skype, AIM, and more. It claims to also allow for task lists to be published and shared with others.
I was just reading an article about the future of CSS. A main focus of the article is on the extremely poor layout capabilities of CSS. One such paragraph from the article goes a long way towards showing the futility of AJAX development today: CSS is great for simple web style. CSS is awful for layout. Rich Ajax apps need layout. You spend the majority of your time trying to get CSS working correctly!