development

Dave Thomas just announced a new Pragmatic Bookshelf series called Pragmatic Fridays. I have no idea what inspired the name “Friday” in this context, but a Pragmatic Friday is a short (60 - 100 pages), low-cost ($7.50 - $10), and focussed book on a specific topic. The books are available for download in PDF form only, and as with all downloadable Pragmatic Bookshelf titles, they contain no DRM. The first Pragmatic Friday title Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby by Caleb Tennis is available for download now, at the price of $8....

I generally try to stay away from writing GUI applications and focus on server side development instead. Still, every once in a while I have an idea for a GUI tool that I’d like to build. My previous post on the upcoming Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby book prompted me to (once again) look into the available GUI toolkits for Ruby. Unlike Java, which has pretty much standardized on the Swing and SWT frameworks, Ruby does not have any clear winners yet....

Here is a nice post on getting started with ActiveRecord migrations. I haven’t played with it yet, but this definitely looks very useful. On my current Rails project, I’ve been going back and forth between using MySQL and using SQLite (although I’m probably sticking with SQLite for now), and I’ve had to manually keep the SQL schema creation scripts in sync between the two databases. Using the database agnostic ActiveRecord syntax sounds like a much cleaner solution....

Martin Fowler has posted a strong endorsement of the Ruby community on his Bliki. Robby has echoed similar sentiments on his Robby on Rails blog. I have not interacted with the Ruby community all that much, but everything I’ve seen so far has been very positive. I’m inclined to agree with Robby that that this is largely due to the cultured nature of many Ruby developers, who come from many other languages such as Java, ....

Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas (aka PragDave) has started a new series of articles about comparing Ruby to other languages. The first article looks at one of the biggest perceived issues, performance. As usual Dave is pragmatic and points out that Ruby is not always the best choice. In most cases however, the relatively small linear performance loss of Ruby compared to, say, J2EE, is negligible when you consider that for a typical enterprise application that does some data shuffling and maybe some basic arithmetic operations, only a small fraction of time (he estimates 5%) is actually spent in code that you write, while the rest of the time is spent on data transfer, database operations (possibly using some kind of object/relational mapping framework), etc....