development

Heroku recently announced a public beta. Heroku is a Rails hosting service with a twist: They offer a fully integrated development and hosting environment. You develop your application using a web based IDE, and it gets automatically deployed to Amazon EC2. The IDE works surprisingly well. You get a typical file browser that allows you to create new files / folders or open, rename, move, or delete existing files /folders. The actual editor performs syntax highlighting and automatic indentation, but does not seem to offer any other convenience features (like auto completion or snippets)....

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka “Matz”) on Ruby 1.9 today. I had heard that he is a very nice guy, and he definitely came across as very charismatic. He is not particularly fluid in English, and in previous interviews I had heard with him, he often used an interpreter. But I was impressed that he actually delivered the presentation (and Q&A) in English....

Merb 0.9.0 was released 5 days ago. It looks like the download instructions on the homepage have also been updated for 0.9.0. You can now install it as a gem or from source, by checking out the code from the Merb Git repository. Aside from a more modular design, Merb 0.9 also introduces a more flexible application layout. Previously, the layout was essentially the same as for a Rails app. This is still the default, but if you create your app using merb-gen my_app --very-flat or --flat, you get a significantly smaller layout that might be better suited for small applications....

Earlier today, Alex Payne blogged about side projects, which prompted me to write down my own thoughts on this matter, as I had been planning a blog post on this subject for a while. Alex states some of the benefits of having a side project, such as keeping you learning, dealing with different types of problems than during the day job, having fun, making new friends, and potentially even being profitable (all of which I completely agree with)....

So where was I? Ah yes, in yesterday’s post I left off with me going back to Ruby for my personal projects. My standard choice for web development has been Ruby on Rails for a while now (although I haven’t had a chance to try Rails 2.0 yet). However, lately I’ve been playing with Merb. Merb is essentially a lightweight Rails replacement, originally built to address some specific (largely bloat and performance related) concerns....