development

Earlier today, TechCrunch’s poorly researched claim that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails in favor of PHP or Java generated a lot of buzz in the Twitter and Ruby communities (the claim was later refuted by Twitter developer Evan Williams). Of course, the article’s comments attracted the usual, ignorant TechCrunch trolls. Most took the opportunity to pitch their framework of choice (such as PHP, Java, .NET, or Django), which they claimed would of course magically solve all of Twitter’s scalability issues....

I just got back from an ice cream social with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH). I had come across his blog post about this casual event last week and figured I’d make my way over there, particularly since the location (Michael’s Gelato & Cafe) in downtown Palo Alto is only 5 minutes from my house. There were probably about 20 other people (mainly Rails developers) at the event, and since the space was pretty small and we didn’t have a dedicated room, it was initially difficult to actually speak with David....

The distributed Git version control system has been gaining a lot of traction lately. In contrast to traditional, centralized version control systems like CVS or Subversion, Git enables developers to easily fork each other’s repositories, pull patches from each other, etc. Even though I have not had a chance to use Git beyond pulling down some open source projects (such as Merb), it is clear that this enables much richer collaboration and development dynamics....

This morning, Apple finally announced details about the long-awaited iPhone SDK. The SDK is available for download starting today, and it sounds pretty intriguing! It comes with a full application stack that includes a custom version of Cocoa (Cocoa Touch), and APIs to access all the iPhone specific features, including hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, the accelerometer, camera, contacts, as well as location-awareness. This sounds a lot more complete that I expected....

Today, I attended a tech talk by ThoughtWorks’ Ola Bini on JRuby (JRuby Wikipedia entry here). I keep hearing great things about JRuby (even Matz has good things to say about it), and it’s nice to hear this from the horse’s mouth as well (Ola is one of the JRuby core developers). Apparently the latest version is highly compatible with Ruby 1.8.6, although applications that use native C extensions are not supported....