development

In my spare time I’ve been playing with Rails for a while now. This week I tried using SwitchTower and ActiveRecord Migrations for the first time, and I’m very impressed. Migrations provide a way for versioning and applying database changes. A simple call to script/generate migration MigrationName generates a new blank migration file with the appropriate version number. The file contains two methods up and down, which up- and down-grade (for rollback purposes) the database respectively....

The Pragmatic Programmers have published another Ruby book: “Learn to Program”, by Chris Pine. The book is intended for new or non-programmers and teaches programming from the ground up - variables, flow control, and everything. It’s nice to see Ruby move even more into the mainstream, and this book looks like a great introduction for new programmers.

Koders is a very cool source code search engine. It indexes many open source projects and covers a wide range of programming languages, including of course Java and Ruby, but also more obscure languages. Clicking on a search result brings up a very nice syntax highlighted version of the source code. Many elements in the source code (such as other class names within Java code) are themselves clickable and bring up the search results for the selected element....

Ruby on Rails 1.0 was released today. David Heinemeier Hansson sums it up well in his blog. At this opportunity, a completely revamped Ruby on Rails website was launched as well. Congrats to David, the Rails Core Team, and all other contributors on this major achievement! Even though the changes from the recent 0.14.x releases were relatively small and the main focus was on stability rather than new features, the official 1....

RubyForge now supports Subversion as an alternative to CVS. If you are looking for a host for an open source project, RubyForge is a great choice (and almost the de-facto standard for Ruby projects), and Subversion support makes this even better. Nice!