It’s been a while since I last blogged about any technologies I’ve been playing with, so I figured I’m due for an update. I am going to split this into a two-part series: First I will play catch up and talk about the technologies that I’ve played with over the past 6 months or so. In the second article, I will go over some of the technologies that I’m currently exploring, or that I am planning to explore next....
For the past 8-9 years, Java has been my bread-and-butter programming language, and to this date it is the language I am most familiar with. However, for the past few years I have developed a growing interest in dynamic scripting languages, and Ruby in particular. To a large extent this was fueled by the elegant Ruby on Rails web application framework, although I have written a few standalone Ruby applications as well....
As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails. In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a more up-to-date version than 1.8.2 (which is included in OSX as of Tiger) for Rails development....
I’ve been working with Ruby (mostly Ruby on Rails) for over a year now, both at work and at home, but I still haven’t settled on a Ruby IDE or editor. Most of my development is done in Linux, but lately I’ve started working in Mac OSX, as I have recently adopted an old PowerBook G4 at work, which then got me hooked and prompted me to go out and buy a Macbook for home as well… (more about my initial experience with OSX later)....
I’ve been meaning to post some sample code for a while, and I always wanted to have a nice WordPress plugin to perform syntax highlighting of code. A cursory search of the WordPress website brought up this page, which lists a bunch of syntax highlighting pluging. However, it appears to be a bit outdated, and many of the plugins are no longer supported, don’t work with WordPress 2.x, or their websites have simply disappeared....