Gadgetopia

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails: For some some odd reason, this post is very obscene, but still interesting. This guy set out to re-write cdbaby.com in Rails. But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn ...

How to build a blog engine in 15 minutes with Ruby on Rails: I haven't watched this all, but it's a video of the Rails guy showing you how to build a blogging platform on Rails in 15 minutes. It sounds like it was a conference presentation that he recorded. ...

Rails Envy: These guys are making Apple-esque adds comparing Rails to everything else ( Hi, I m Rails and I m PHP ). They re pretty good, and more or less spot-on. The end of #2 is an absolute riot. Via CMSWatch.

I've been working with Rails for a few weeks now and it's making "install" vs. "build" decisions much harder -- (We interrupt this post to get two things out of the way: Yes, Rails is as good as everyone is saying. And yes, that pisses me off too. I worked ...

Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream: I don't know if I agree with this, but it's well-written and well-reasoned. The writer predicts that Rails will become a the Smalltalk or Lisp of this generation -- a highly advanced technology that still works great but never got popular. There is ...

A List Apart: ALA is shiny and new this morning. Looks pretty. New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system powered by Ruby on Rails. As the dog days of summer draw to a close, we present A List Apart 4.0. So buy a tee shirt already. I wonder ...

Get ready for the Rails buzz to reach a fever pitch: Ruby on Rails has made a 1.0 release. I can't believe that its been only two years since I started working with Ruby. So much has happened since that its hard to think that I was actually doing PHP, ...

What Is Ruby on Rails: The article has been posted around quite a bit, but it's good so I'll reiterate here. This is a recap of all the things that make Rails awesome. This is not a technical introduction to the platform, but rather a look at all the features ...

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard): Rails will be preinstalled on the next version of the Apple OS. It's finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X. Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We've been working with Apple ...

Ruby on Rails chases simplicity in programming: CNet finally gets around to reporting on Rails. It's Hansson-worship at its most blatant, but still a good read. His goal with Ruby on Rails is not to create a sophisticated development framework that the engineers at Google or Amazon.com will flock to. ...

David Heinemeier Hansson has published the first release of Rails, his MVC implementation for Ruby. Rails is the system David developed to power BaseCamp, the 37 Signals project management app. David had previously released Active Record, his O-R mapping layer for Rails, which is the slickest method of database access ...

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE: Looks interesting. I couldn't find much in the way of screenshots, though. There's a video, but it's about how to import a project, not about actually using the app. RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal ...

Qcodo - PHP Development Framework: I think you're going to see that phrase a lot in the future: "Rails for [insert language here]." I had heard that Cake was "Rails for PHP," but after watching some demos, I think the QCodo guys have actually obtained that title. It is a ...

Mephisto -- The best blogging system ever: First we get Beast, a forum in Rails; then Radiant, a CMS in Rails; and Mephisto, a blogging platform in Rails. There may be something to this Rails thing.

RailFrog / CMS Ridin' on Rails: Here's the first Rails CMS...or not, actually. It's a plan for a CMS. There's apparently been nothing written, but they have a site and a logo and a name. I'm endeavoring to help jumpstart the development of an open-source CMS application, built using Ruby ...

The Ascendancy of Ruby: Someone made an innocent MetaFilter post about how much momentum Ruby has these days. The comments -- both pro-Ruby and otherwise -- have been heated and entertaining. Some good ones: Ruby seems to be caught up in some sort of blogger-positive-feedback-loop, its practically viral marketing. There's ...

Django | The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines: This framework has been around for a while, so maybe Rails is "Django for Ruby"? Developed and used over the past two years by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed from scratch to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of ...

Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python: I always thought that a good way to gauge adoption of a language is by the amount of space its books occupy at the local Barnes and Noble. This is sort of the same thing. While I was looking at the data, though, I noticed ...

Radiant CMS: The first true CMS for Ruby, it looks like. We've talked about RailFrog before, but I don't know whether that one ever got past the planning stages. Radiant has a demo, and it seems to be complete. Via CMS Report.

Why CMS sucks: This guy responded to my comments on boxed CMSs. I'll quote his post in its entirety: The only way to solve a CMS problem is create a programmable Content Engine. Other than that, it is very hard to create a CMS that can fulfill a specific website ...

Is Perl Still Relevant?: An interesting answer from Tim O'Reilly about whether or not he thinks Perl is still relevant. In terms of the competitive landscape among programming languages, in addition to PHP, Python has long been gaining on Perl. From about 1/6 the size of the Perl market when ...

BlackJax: A really nice little Ajax-ified Blackjack game written in Rails. Fun and simple.

Rails: So what was the biggest shock of the Basecamp seminar? Finding out that it was written in Ruby. Yeah, that's right that Japanese language that you thought no one was using. They've apparently put together a Web development framework for it which they're releasing to open-source. Rails is ...

Beast: An open source Rails forum in under 500 lines of code: The link text really says it all. Rick Olson and Josh Goebel have teamed up to produce Beast, a lightweight but well styled forum. Rails has sorely been lacking a good, well styled, open source forum, but Beast ...

Language Wars: Spolsky has a fun post on how to pick a language for your next Web app. [...] the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of ...

Zend Framework: Zend has released their framework Web site and has a preview release out there. There's documentation, including some good code samples. Inserting a record: class RoundTable extends Zend_Db_Table {} $table = new RoundTable(); $data = array('noble_title' => 'King', 'first_name' => 'Arthur', 'favorite_color' => 'blue') $id = $table->insert($data); Getting ...

I was watching The History Channel tonight, and they had a bit on about how missiles are tested without actually turning missiles loose in the air. What was needed was a way to maintain full control over the missile's trajectory even if something went terribly wrong. The answer? Put it ...

O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf: This is part of Safari Online, of which I'm a member and big fan. Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to learn a new technology right now, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. You'll get early access ...

One thing keeping me from completely jumping ship from PHP to Rails is the absense of a Markdown equivalent. Oh, wait...

ASP.Net on a Roll: O'Reilly indicates that ASP 2.0 is the hot technology these days. Based on book sales data, it looks like ASP.Net 2.0 is on fire, with ASP-related book sales up 53% since the same period a year ago, versus PHP, down 3%, and JSP, down 25%. Of ...

David Heinemeier Hansson (of Rails) fame put an interesting post up on his blog the other day regarding Rails as a 'disruptive technology', but I think that his point also applies to a lot of other "fringe" development frameworks as well. The industry is being massively over-served by J2EE/.NET in ...

Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET?: This is a post that asks a solid question: Where are all the cool startups that run on ASP.NET? It s a good question. Where are they? Why do all the rock star start-ups use CakePHP or Rails or anything but ...

Streamlined: I was reading about Streamlined, a new plugin for Rails, when I noticed a bunch of buttons at the top of the screen with a handy drop down help file. While I think this is cool, does anyone use it beyond the curiousity stage?

Radiant s Radiance-: A nice roundup of the features of Radiant, the first real CMS for Rails. It s starting to get some traction, it seems. It walks the line between complexity and simplicity very well. And we all know how slippery a slope that is.

CMP Media's Software Development Magazine Announces Finalists for the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence & Productivity Awards: The Jolt Awards for this year have been announced. Everything from the best in books to the best in databases to the best in frameworks. Rails made the list, so did the .Net ...

Mongrel: A Web server written in Ruby. Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI. It is framework agnostic and already supports Ruby On Rails, Og Nitro, and Camping ...

Taking a look at ten different PHP frameworks: There are a lot of PHP frameworks floating around these days. I think the Ruby on Rails legacy (besides a ton of great apps) will be that it got everyone talking about frameworks again. This article compares ten PHP frameworks. Seagull seems ...

YamlInFiveMinutes: I mentioned YAML a couple of times in a prior post, and while looking for a good link, I found this little tutorial. It's quite good, and, true to the title, it's short -- I think I got through it in four minutes. YAML is so much nicer than ...

JavaScriptTemplates: With all the Ajax and client-side stuff floating around these days, we really need things like this. The JST engine is written entirely in standard JavaScript. It supports a productive template markup syntax very much like FreeMarker, Velocity, Smarty. JST is a readable alternative to manually coded massive String ...

Dabble DB: 7 Minute Video: Holy cats, this app looks good. Think Access on the Web. I shut off the video halfway through, because it was just too much to handle. My head is spinning. Good Lord, man -- someone get me some water. This comes via has_many :though, which ...

Note: I got scammed here. See the comments. Ajax Sucks Most of the Time: Surprise -- he hates it. Ajax breaks the unified model of the Web and introduce a new way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. With ...

PHP Collaboration Project: Zend has announced that they're developing a new framework and "environment" for PHP. [...] the initial focus is on two areas: the creation of an open source Zend PHP Framework and engagement with the Eclipse Foundation around PHP. Having a PHP IDE and framework will empower PHP ...

InfoCentral: About five years ago, I wrote an application for my church to track people and families. I wrote about it here. I open-sourced it, and it got adopted by quite a few organizations. I went to check on it today, and I find that the site is still around, ...

Wasabi: In response to comments from his post yesterday (which we discussed), Joel has released information about Wasabi, which is a compiler they wrote so they code generate code for FogBugz in VBScript (for Windows) or PHP (for Linux). Fog Creek used to write in VBScript and automatically convert it ...

A pro-PHP Rant: Harry Fuecks gives us a wonderful, glorious rant on why PHP is good, no matter how many beat-downs it takes -- and it's been beat down a lot lately. He starts with the simplicity and reliability... There are smallish sites I own / run, built on PHP, ...

I have a serious Web development neurosis: I hate querystring arguments. You know the garbage after the page name in a URL? Like this: page.php?thisArgument=thisValue&andThisArgument=thisValue I hate them. I think they're ugly, unweidly, and expose too much of your application to the world. This is an utterly irrational thing, I ...

I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like: SitePoint has a brutally accurate post about CMSs and making them run actual Web sites. The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and ...

I've been looking for a small project to test out the Rails framework, so I've decided to combine that with exploring ways to reduce the time and complexity involved in creating a blog entry. This will be an ongoing series of articles, but this is a low-priority project, so each ...

I've been spending some time working with Smarty lately. This is ostensibly a "templating language" for PHP. But I think it goes beyond that. I assert that Smarty has become a sub-language all by itself. (Update: I thought of a much better name for this: "sand-boxed PHP." That's what Smarty ...

Here's something not that shocking: the same amount of time spent on different Web development activities can yield vastly different productive results. Put another way: you can spend two hours on Activity A or the same amount of time on Activity B. Does this mean they will both contribute equally ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...

When you get neck deep into a content management implementation, you can lose sight of the actual publishing mechanism-- how the content gets from your system to the end user's browser. No matter how sophisticated your CMS is, at some point, a user enters a URL and some content comes ...