So I just discovered that Leopard comes with a version of Ruby on Rails (RoR) pre-installed. The only problem is its a bit dated but there is a command-line one-liner to update it all no sweat with RubyGem (the Ruby package manager):
sudo gem install rails
of course you can also get RubyGem to update itself too:
sudo gem update --system
I love systems that keep themselves up-to-date.
Then to get going, get back to the command-line and create the project somewhere with mysql support:
rails -d mysql ~/Sites/myNewApp
And it should generate the basic RoR site layout. To test it, run the build in web server:
cd ~/Sites/myNewApp
ruby scripts/server
And then point your favourite web browser at http://127.0.0.1:3000/ and your away!
I’ve just started to learn Pythons answer to the MVC framework race: Django, but I’m lazy and when I came across this info this morning and how easy it was to get RoR up and running on Leopard I was suckered in. I guess I’ll learn both and compare the two at some point.
I just stumbled across the SIMILE project form the famous MIT and, as the screen cast above proves, they have some hot stuff to play with both online for your website and software extensions for FireFox and Thunderbird. This is almost enough to switch back to Thunderbird from the tired old, doggy Mail (Mac)!
I was looking at the PHP5 (no this is not about PHP) Reflection API and came across a post talking about the “Dynamic Proxy” design pattern. As I didn’t know what it was about I did a quick search and found that the design pattern had a US Patent on it! I was disgusted and appalled that design patterns could be patented. This is like putting a patent on a certain English sentence grammar.
Obviously the guys at the US Patent office don’t understand what they are allowing to happen. Imagine if 90% of all programming was patented, which can be done fairly easily, it would completely retard innovation and an sort of progress. Fortunately is this impossible to enforce in closed source code software but Open Source [OS] is another story. This could be the biggest legal threat to OS so far. Large companies who have the budget, could have teams that sift thought their OS competition looking for patent infringements and shutting them down. An ugly thought which would gain them only hatred from the developer community. Lets hope that’s enough of a disincentive…
Pictured (from left): Tobias aka klipstein (München), Norman aka matsuri (Berlin), Victoria & Nikolai aka nonken (Amsterdam) and Wolfram aka mccain (München) [note: aka’s are IRC names
Yesterday I meet some Dojo developers in Berlin for the dojo.beer() which was announced on the Dojo website last week. It was a sunny day and we hit one of Berlins many beaches next to the Spree.
Dojo is a Javascript API that I have a love-hate relationship with and have been following for 3-4 years now. It was nice to finally meet other Dojo developers and have someone to discuss the joys and woes of the prolific Javascript API, the best out there in my opinion.
It was perhaps too hot and the beer() was too easy to drink as we didn’t manage to get much decided but the idea for a community maintained Wiki documenting Dojo was thought to be a good idea. These guys setup the Dojo Campus site and so this Wiki will probably end up there.
I hope this see the drive for more European activity form the Dojo community in the future!
I’ve been kicking the idea of a central way to manage accounts on many social networking apps for a while now. I think it starts to go beyond just managing social-network accounts because what your really doing is managing identity.
This is a great little video that explains what RSS is about. I’m always looking for these sorts of things to help people with the “tricky” stuff about the web.
(by the way you can subscribe to this site if you like :)
The name AJaX comes from one article written in January of 2005which was the first to use the acronym AJaX. In it is mentioned the technology (i..e the one function ‘XMLHttpRequest’) had been around for some time and is probably the only significant contribution that Microsoft has made to the internet’s development to date. Continue reading ‘The significance of AJaX’
