Day four and we've lost track of which hurt more, our livers or our feet. After yesterday's Facebook keynote revolt, we planned on a day of exceptional interviews and kept our tightly packed schedules close at hand. As they often warn, life is what happens when you're making other plans.
We did manage to hook up with the folks at Twine for a fantastic interview which really explained what's behind their beta mode invite only fortress. After that the guys from Five Runs stopped by to talk about their fantastic new app for monitoring your Ruby on Rails server, a piece that's sorely needed in the modern web services space. Shiv Signh from Razorfish then met up with us to talk about how social media can work for large corporations, and some of the hurdles they face in adopting healty social marketing practices.
The bad sprits Zuckerberg left in the event hall yesterday were still floating heavy in the air. Around 2pm the word came down that there would be a rematch. Zuckerberg a mulligan, a do-over in the vernacular of the playground, this time off site, and the inter-conference grapevine was douced with gasoline and set ablaze. There would be blood, someone's milkshake would be drank, and the whole thing was going down at 4pm.
Good computer science graduates do not make good software developers. Really, I mean it. But for the polar opposite reason that these two New York University computer science professors think.
When I was in high school my physics teacher once told us, "All physics experiments work. They just may not work the way you want them to."
This encapsulates neatly what software development is all about. On one hand, it is science. It is deterministic. Each programming language statement performs exactly as stated (baring bugs in the compiler, or the SDK, or the OS). On the other hand, software development is closer to engineering where years of experience allows a software developer to spot patterns in the model and apply them to build a system.
Unfortunately, just as in physics, computer science courses do not prepare students for what comes after graduation. Skills that are considered crucial in almost all commercial software projects are either not taught in college or are only touched upon. This disparity between the skills graduates possess and what the industry is looking for means it generally takes one to two years of working in real life project for a graduate to become fully trained.
Microsoft, the captains of closed source, have officially taken the first steps to support Ruby within the .Net environment, a move seen as a way to cozy up to the upcoming generation of hardcore web developers who've cut their teeth on the Ruby language.
Released under the "Microsoft Permissive License", IronRuby uses the Dynamic Languages Runtime to get the job done. Support at this point is extremely preliminary, but Microsoft says it hopes to release IronRuby on RubyForge, and take submissions and additions from the wider community. Eventually, support for Ruby apps on Microsoft's Silverlight platform will be forthcoming; a bit of good news for a fair number of developers
Sometimes the headlines just write themselves. Easy HTML To Any Script Converter deserves an award for most accurately named program - ever! It does just what it says. The basic idea is that you paste in a block of HTML, select a language, hit go, and copy the code into your application. The Converter delivers a block of code for the particular language you selected with all offending characters escaped correctly and the HTML ready to be printed to the users screen.
A large number of languages are supported ranging from C# to PHP to JavaScript to Ruby. The actual conversion process is pretty simple. You can even setup your own conversion routine if your particular coding flavor isn't included with the default languages. Another nice feature is that you can convert a single file or a large list of files automatically, without having to copy and paste anything.
One other feature, which appears to have been added as an after thought, is a simple Email to Javascript conversion tool. Enter your email address and the subject you'd like the email to contain and the tool will generate some illegible code that you can put on your web page. The code should protect your email address from the various harvesting bots often used by spammers, but still allow your visitors to email you without going through a nasty contact form.
If you are a developer or designer looking for a list of great tools, check out the Protolize database. Tony has archived a listing of the most current and useful web tools. With categories ranging from CSS, Javascript, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, Flash, CMS, and Inspiration, you will surely get cooking with some top grade code. Each link is rated, and most contain a little description of what it works for as well as user reviews. Protolize is also quite pleasing to navigate with its sexy web 2.0 style. If you don't find what you're looking for on the site, or want to submit your site for inclusion in the directory, Protolize does have a submission form. Tip: Check out the Top Rated category for some real fresh stuff!
Have you ever wanted to learn about Ruby (the programming language) or learn more of it, or just know what they call what you already know? This little e-book will help you out. It is free, and is available online, for download, or as a printed copy (not free). Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book is a great resource for programmers and newbies alike. You will find out about Jeff, the dancing ficus, which isn't quite the same as cartoon foxes, chunky bacon, and elves with pet hams (good form you know...) but it is quite good anyhow. Don't know what Ruby even is? Well, all the more reason to go find out. It is "a programmer's best friend." Dang, I thought my best friend was my light-up USB dog, Fluffy...never mind.
Most days I'm totally happy with my Windows PC, but some days I want a Mac.* I've got a thing for scripting of all kinds, and the days I most want a Mac, it seems, are when I see someone doing something really cool with AppleScript, like RubyOSA. To quote its web site, "RubyOSA is a bridge that connects Ruby to the Apple Event Manager infrastructure. In big words, it allows you to do in Ruby what you could do in AppleScript." It fetches information from OS X apps about their components and then maps them directly to Ruby classes and methods. While AppleScript isn't exactly fugly, I'm a big Ruby fan and seeing it do stuff like this really gets my vitals up. I would love to say "I wish someone would do this kind of thing for Windows apps," but the tragedy is that Windows has no standard scripting interface like AppleScript, and certainly none that is widely implemented.
*For the record, some days I want to ditch everything for Ubuntu instead. And now, back to your regularly scheduled not-quite-so-uber-geeky programming.
I just about laughed my butt off reading this. I'll warn you by saying that you need to be a programmer to even "get" the list of language jokes on this page. Of course you will identify with several different languages than I did most likely, but it is a very funny, very enjoyable site to peruse. My non-programmer wife even enjoyed a few of them because some of them are just funny to read aloud. Don't know what I'm talking about? That's why you have to visit the site, you'll get it. A bit of well-placed programming humor, don't you think?
SAP's new download includes a bunch of open-source tools including RadRails, Eclipse, PHP/Ruby/Python code generators, and SAP's scripting tools. This shows the growing trend that large software companies are beginning to realize the huge value of free open-source frameworks and ideas. Eclipse and RadRails are excellent tools to use, even for the wizards at SAP so it only makes sense that they use these tools and bundle them for developers. I have always considered SAP to be somewhat forward thinking, but this proves they see the value in the tools already freely available to developers. They are only making life easier on themselves and keeping developers happy too. Sun, Microsoft, IBM, and others have shown signs of embracing open-source tools, though they haven't quite brought their open-source offerings to their full potential. They haven't quite reached critical mass, but they are on the way.
I'm a big fan of the Ruby programming language, as won't surprise long-time readers, so I'm excited to report that Ruby's progenitors are getting ready to launch the new ruby-lang.org. The new site, which is residing at new.ruby-lang.org while the final bugs are ironed out, has a brand new design which, in my opinion, is a huge step forward. It seems intended to give those who are new to the language a very quick overview of what it looks like and then let them dive straight in. At the top of the front page is a short description of the language's main selling points alongside a short code sample. There's a "Get Started" box to the right that links to _why's superb Try Ruby, the Ruby download page, a 20-minute tutorial, and guides for those coming from other languages. The front page also includes a blog with recent Ruby news, natch.
A year ago, developing a web application using Ruby on Rails (which recently turned two years old) on Windows was a bit of a pain due to the lack of a decent integrated development environment (IDE). Now we're practically swimming in them. Let's recap: There's RadRails, the popular cross-platform, Eclipsed-based editor, RoRED, one for Windows with a unique M/V/C tab grouping, Ruby in Steel, an add-on for Visual Studio 2005, and now RIDE-ME, a new Windows-only Rails IDE with an uncomfortable-sounding name. RIDE-ME bills itself as "geared primarily toward developers who are migrating from a Microsoft development platform," which puts it in competition with Ruby in Steel. Version 1.0 of RIDE-ME was just released, and when I tried it out I was impressed by its snappiness, but I did come across several fairly ugly bugs that seem more at home in a 0.9 or 1.0 beta. I won't be switching from RadRails just yet, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on RIDE-ME.
O'Reilly Radar reports that Ruby programming book sales outpace Perl books. This is somewhat surprising, but not unexpected. Ruby is quickly becoming a popular language. Surpassing Perl is a clue that Ruby is gaining significant ground on its way to stardom. While Ruby is seen as the primadonna of web coding by many, it does hold real value. Ruby offers a lot of the things developers have needed for a long time. It simplifies a lot of programming concepts and is worth the lookup. You can download Ruby free and you'll see why it is quickly gaining ground in the web dev world.
Blogger Jarosław Rzeszótko sent ten questions to a bunch of notable programmers and posted their answers on his blog. Though not all of his recipients replied, several big names did, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Guido Van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, James Gosling, creator or Java, and Ruby hackers Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. To a programmer like myself, their answers are fascinating. Some of the most interesting answers are to the "How did you learn programming?" and "Next big thing" questions. It's interesting to see that the none of the respondents came up with the same answer to "What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?"
I love Ruby on Rails, but I have to admit, the acronym "RoR" kind of annoys me. Anyway, I won't let that idiosyncrasy of mine be a strike against RoRED, a brand new integrated development environment (IDE) for Ruby on Rails. RoRED is Windows-only app that has most of the features you expect in a basic IDE, like syntax highlighting (for both Ruby and HTML/RHTML), tabbed documents, and a file management/navigation pane. It also has easy navigation between methods, bookmarks and "hyperbookmarks," and macros. In addition, it also has a few Rails-specific features, like automatic grouping of model, view, and controller tabs, and buttons for managing servers and consoles. RoRED is free and a pleasantly light download: just 790kb.
InstantRails is a simple to use LAMP-like package that you can download to get Rails running on Windows in an instant. It includes a MySQL database, Ruby, Rails, Apache web server, and even some Ruby on Rails applications for you to modify including a version of Typo. InstantRails has both FastCGI and Webbrick, so you can develop with either. I find InstantRails is great for portability, such as on a USB flash drive, but isn't the greatest if you really want to do some decent programming with either Ruby or with Rails. Still the best idea is to install Ruby and MySQL from scratch. It isn't that difficult and it makes everything easier in the long run. InstantRails is also good for newbies to start on, but I find the file structure a little confusing (not that Rails doesn't already add to that).
