Category Archives: Ruby on Rails

My First Rails Plugin

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I’ve just published my first Ruby on Rails plugin! As it couldn’t be otherwise, it’s called “Acts as Manifesto” (following the long tradition of “acts as” plugins in the Rails world) and you can find the project page here.

It is the simplest possible plugin, adding a generator to your Rails application. This generator allows you to create a “manifesto” and a “signature” model to your application, and as you can guess, a manifesto can have several signatures. Simple and fast way to have such a system up and running in no time.

It is hosted on Google Code, and I plan to make some adjustments to it later. Do not hesitate to post your comments here! I would love to know if you find it useful.

Deliver. Now.

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Every time I talk with people about Ruby on Rails in Switzerland, I almost always get the same comments, no matter what is the background of the person I’m talking to:

Yes but… what about [scalability / performance]? [I'm sure / I've read / I think / I believe / I have dreamt] that Ruby on Rails is not as [fast / scalable / powerful] than [J2EE / .NET / PHP / ASP / CGI / WebObjects / Python / Perl]

It’s very funny indeed, for many reasons:

  1. None of these comments came from people running something like Facebook, or at least any other site with more than 10000 visits per month;
  2. None of the people who said something like the above has tried Ruby on Rails, beyond the 15 minute blog thing, which everyone seems to have done.

It seems to me that there’s a problem here. Continue reading →

A Simple Recipe for Podcast Success

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I am subscribed to quite a few podcasts and screencasts here and there. And I’ve come up with a very basic (albeit limited and you could even say irrational) way of determining which to keep listening and which to throw away immediately:

The quality of the material… and the voice of the speaker.

I’m not Pavarotti nor Alfredo Caruso, but some voices just irritate me. I just experienced this through the Heroku screencasts; the guy’s voice is not really nice (at all), kind of creepy even, hard to follow, I don’t know how to describe it. It is annoying to follow a 10-minute presentation like this; really, I’m sorry, but that’s how I felt it, even if his service seems really interesting and I might even try it in the future.

Compare now with Ryan Bates of Railscasts: his voice is adapted, serious yet young, with the right pitch and speed. It makes following the explanations easy, moreover taking into account that I’m not a native English speaker. The Railscasts are a perfect example of what I like in podcasts and screencasts: short descriptions (15 min max) of extremely useful features, with practical uses and with some background as well to get the idea. The site (and Ryan) is absolutely brilliant.

As I said, is a purely subjective point of view, but that’s (one) of the criteria I use to decide whether to keep listening to a podcast / screencast or not. The other being the contents, of course; throw in a nice voice spitting nonsense and you won’t have much better luck than the Heroku guy.

The notable exception to this rule must be obviously David Heinemeier Hansson; his first videos showing how to do a weblog in Rails in 15 minutes are just insane; the guy’s voice is really awful, too highly pitched and somehow disturbing. But the stuff he showed was great, and I stuck with that instead :)

Simultaneously

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Incredible. I just came accross this blog called “One Month App”. The guys from Clear Function have been working on Pulse, a web-based application, more or less at the same time as I was working on Parking Friend (from the end of September to mid-October)! Their design is nicer than mine, though :)

It is also interesting to see that their toolset is more or less the same as mine (it’s a typical Rails stack, after all) but I’ve used Inkscape and Gimpshop instead of the Adobe Creative Suite applications (which I do not own). In any case, it is possible: you can create really complex applications in Rails, in a really small amount of time. This is not something that all development stacks allows you to do!

Congratulations for the release to the team of Clear Function!

Riding the Rails Again

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It feels soooooo good to :)

Let me introduce you to Parking Friend. This website, which I had the pleasure to design and develop, belongs to some friends of mine, currently starting their own valet parking service in Geneva. Located not far from the airport, Jake, Dieter and their team will take care of your car for a small daily fee, for as many days as needed, meeting you at the airport (or anywhere else, for that matter) when you leave and when you return, cleaning up your car and even doing some shopping for you if you need. Handy, easy, relaxing.

Technically speaking, this is my first public, mainstream Ruby on Rails application. What can I say? It has been a delight to create by all means. It took me two weeks to do it, working… on “rails” precisely :) in the morning and evening trains while going to and from work, as well as during the weekends. Continue reading →

Quick Comparison of C# and Ruby

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Introduction

I have been working as a software developer since 1996, and as such I’ve used a variety of different languages, both compiled and interpreted. But the who languages that I know and use most today, are two somewhat different ones, C# and Ruby. I will begin my presentation with a short explanation of both, providing their major similarities and differences, and then providing some code samples of both.

Both languages are ranked #7 and #21 respectively in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, as of February 2006 (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm).

Continue reading →

A new programming language every year…

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Somewhere I read that it was a good thing to learn at least one new programming language every year; I think I have kept up that trend since 1992:

And this year’s winner is: LINQ. The main purpose of learning it is to prepare the LINQ conference in the TechDays next week… and this is huge indeed!

How to install Eclipse/RadRails in Ubuntu 5.10 “Breezy”

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Another quick “how to” for Ubuntu: Sam Ruby posted enough information to make Eclipse work under Ubuntu “Breezy” (the default installation, via System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager has problems when using the “Help / Software Updates” function, used to install RadRails…)

Go to this page and get the job done! http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/10/26/RadRails-Eclipse-on-Breezy-take-1