Clever::Tagline::Pending

The Rails Podcast has an excellent interview with Josh Shairbaum and Dan Manges from JP Morgan on using Rails in the enterprise. Do check it out if you’re at all interested in introducting Ruby/Rails to your particular company.

Listening to Josh and Dan made me realise that I’m quite fortunate to be working in a company where there are no corporate traditions to follow when it comes to technology. I’ve developed 2 applications for use by staff and clients alike so far and they’re both powered by Rails. Being the sole developer in my company, Rails is a perfect fit and this combination has shown its worth.

Josh mentioned that his development team of 3 got Rails in the door by using it to develop a reporting application, an app where the implementing technology was not a big issue with corporate managers. By having the reporting application running AND available to end users within 1.5 months demonstrated the productivity gains that can be achieved by Rails. A lot of evangelizing and demonstrations were done to help their cause too. I think that they benefited a fair bit from having key people in other functional units willing to give Rails a try, even though it required them to risk doing something that’s new and by corporate definition, risky.

It’s encouraging to listen to them and their passion for Rails was apparent in the way they talked about and how they dealt with people who did not understand what it was.

I’ve started using RSpec in my Rails projects. Besides serving the purposes of testing my application, it has also become an extremely useful design tool. Comparing the DSLs for Test::Unit and RSpec, the latter expresses the intention of the tests much more clearly and quickly. Luke Redpath does a great job of explaining the basics of Behaviour Driven Development using RSpec on Rails. Its a must read if you’re interested in exploring BDD for your Rails development.

Technorati Tags: Rails, Ruby, Testing

Leave it to the Japanese to have a theme song for a software practices conference.

I had to reinstall OSX the other day as certain applications were crashing with alarming frequency. As I’ve installed DarwinPorts(now called MacPorts) for managing my software development libraries, I reinstalled the usual application via port install app. Now everything went pretty smoothly, Rails, Apache2, Lighttpd, MySQL and PHP4 were all installed without much hassle.

But when I tried to login as root to the MySQL daemon, I kept getting a “Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)” error message. The odd thing was that I did not set a password for the root account during installation. Some searching on the internet suggested resetting the root password. However, that didn’t work, nor did reinstalling MySQL.

The issue was finally solved after following the suggestion from Abel Lopez from the comments sections of this page in the MySQL documentation. It turns out that the mysql user which owns the processes spawned from MySQL daemon didn’t have enough privileges for the data directory. The workaround was to remove /opt/local/var/db/mysql5/, recreate it and set its ownership via chown mysql:mysql.

After this was done, I re-ran the database install script and sure enough, I was able to login as root and change the password as well.

I have an idea for a non-commercial web application that involves people and places where these folks can hang out. So I figured that having location maps would be rather useful. However, I’m targeting a very narrow market: people who live in Singapore. Google Maps may have the world mapped out but their maps of Singapore does not go down into the level of detail that I’m looking for.

Looking for help in singapore.rb, I was informed that the more prominent provider of location maps in Singapore, Streetdirectory.com is not at all friendly to having external data consumers make use of its copyrighted geodata. However, approaching can.com.sg and sg.pagenation.com might prove more fruitful. I’ve sent both an email asking whether an API is available for their services. Just gotta wait for their replies then.

Update
That was fast, about 10 minutes after sending the email, I received a reply from Peter Tong of pagenation.com. Unfortunately, pagenation does not currently have an API. Bummer, that leaves screen scraping as a solution. However, he is very accomodating of any and all requests to link to the maps, I love that.

Another Update
The reply from can.com.sg came in about 2 days, it appears that they do not have an API as well as don’t plan to offer it anytime soon. I was referred to Agis Pte Ltd instead. This is the company that supplies map data to can.com.sg, another source to check out, I suppose.

Krugle is a search engine aimed specifically for developers of code. What it provides is a centralised location for finding and browsing source code for projects available in open source.

I have only played around with it for a short time, so I’ll be reserving any judgement for later. Its currently a closed beta, so access is restricted to people who received an access code for account registration.

Elliotte Rusty Harold has an entertaining story of REST and WS-* in the real world. One that involves air-conditioners. It wouldn’t take a genius to see that he’s in favour of RESTful interfaces as opposed to using Web Services. Personally, I haven’t had much experience with the implementation of external services using either, so it was a humorous read at least.

Zed Shaw shares his insights and experiences in building Mongrel.

From spacebar,

A glimpse into the Mac Business Software unit at Redmond. Read on.

James McGovern, self-confessed Enterprise Architect and Thought Leader, states that Ruby is simply not ready for the enterprise. In his somewhat entertaining post, he gives more emphasis on the cultural aspect of software development. As expected, there has been a rash of responses to this:

• David H. H [Boy, is James McGovern enterprise or what!]
• Dare Obasanjo [My Website is Bigger Than Your Enterprise]
• Anne 2.0 [When Fundamentalists Meet: 37Signals vs. McGovern]
• Coté [McGovern Comes out Swingin' on Ruby in the Enterprise]

In McGovern’s post, he states that cultural factors play a bigger part in the development process than technical issues and as he so eloquently put it, “An idiot with a tool is still a fool”. While he may have well made one valid point about needing “established” research firms like Forrester or Gartner show some love to Ruby in order to get the PHBs in the enterprise to start noticing it, I take issue with the rest.

What peeved me the most about the post was that McGovern claimed that there were no good books on Ruby and that they touched only on the simplistic aspects of software design. Excuse me, James…would something like Enterprise Integration with Ruby interest you? Or how about the Pickaxe?

RTFB, McGovern.