Posts Tagged ‘rails’

Insight, Facts and Hmmms

November 30th, 2008

I’m a big fan of Google Insight.  Mainly because it burns time when I’m bored and provides lots of “hmm” moments.  Its a service Google provide that lets you see search volume against a range of other factors such as geography, time, etc.  I thought I’d put a few together that may be of interest to you all.

Django is HUGE in Russia

I have no idea why this is.  Maybe because Django sounds slightly Russian?  No thats ridiculous.  But just look at those numbers – compared to the US and the UK (doesn’t appear) its huge!

Why do the Russians Love Django?

Why do the Russians Love Django?

Rails is in Decline

The Google searches tell no lies.  It seems that Rails is in decline while Django is on a steady and solid incline.  Vive le Django.

My Heart Bleeds

Everyone Forgot How to Use PHP’s substr Function

A collective dose of amnesia seems to have struck the world as the search term “substr” seems to have had an 80% increase in recent years.

Surely its Not Hard?

Surely its Not Hard?

Scala? Don’t bother.

Scala was big a few months back with a sudden influx of tutorials and discourse posted to dZone.  Unfortunately looking at the graph its pointless bothering with it.  On top of that Guido doesn’t think much of it either – and he knows his languages.

See that Bottom Feeder?  Scala.

See that Bottom Feeder? Scala.

Canadians Love Merb

I like Canadians.  They were never quite so anti-British as the Americans.  They still have our Queen as their head of State and have none of the beligerant crankiness of republicans in America and Australia.  Its no suprise then that they like Merb – a lot.  Merb is of course ‘Rails-that-works’.

God Save the Queen

God Save the Queen

Well I’m sure you’ve all enjoyed these stunning eye-openers.  If I find anymore then I’ll be sure to let you all know.  In the mean time – have a good day.

What a Suprise – Even D2H’s Rails Crashed

November 29th, 2008

The man who created Rails can’t even keep his Rails site from going down when Digged.

I’d like to suggest he use a framework that just works.

Switching From Rails to Django: Why?

November 15th, 2008

Rails is crap.  There – I said it.  Apologies to the geek with a peanut dick but it just sucks really bad.

Compared to PHP – Rails is Great

Yeah it is great – its epic in fact.  But then again that isn’t very hard is it considering how shit PHP is?

Stop Stealing Ruby’s Limelight

The reason people love Rails is because of Ruby.  It pisses me off when I hear people getting pissed off with having to learn Ruby so they can use Rails.  For crying out loud!!  Ruby is the foundation, cause, Nu(n), beginning, soul, reason for Rails existence.  All of those funky little things that Rails can do are entirely due to Ruby.  Ruby is an amazing language and Rails is an insult rather than a blessing to it.

Rails and Mongrel = Unstable

Every time I get into an argument regarding Rails’ reliability it comes back to: “It must be your code”.

Well fair enough.  Lets say my code is the reason that all my Rails sites fail at least once a week.  Or maybe its my setup, or server config.  Maybe I’m not using Mongrel right.  I’m a dumb fuck who can’t use Rails…

But…

This “dumb fuck” can setup and manage multiple Django sites without issue.  Without hassle.  Without self delusion.  Without restarts every fu*king week!  This “dumb fuck” has had 3 Django sites running for the past 8 months with no downtime.

Okay – so I could setup scripts to kick Mongrel back in when it falls over.  I could manage or code better.  I could do many things.  But why the fuck should I?

I think a good analogy is this:

  • Rails = Windows
  • Django = Apple

You see – Django Just (fucking) Works.  Like a Mac.  Nice and simple.  Reliable.  Consistent.

Rails needs hacking and bollocking around with until it settles.  Then you need to faff some more when it plays up.  Sounds familiar doesn’t it?  Just like Windows.

But All the Cool Kids Use Rails

Yeah – all the cool kids use Rails.  Do you remember that all the “cool kids” at school were normally the biggest dicks in the school?  They were the thickest, most aggressive, most lacking in self confidence and respect.  They followed a ‘leader’ blindly because they were too weak to follow their own path.

The Rails community comes in two parts:

  • A core of heavily invested super-egotistical fat-assed vermin that need it to continue in order to make money training, publishing, etc.
  • A huge cloud of numb nuts who don’t know how to program but jumped on the Rails bandwagon to be cool.  These people invariably make themselves look like idiots when challenged.

Lets look at some real technology leaders:

Google - they use Python for the majority of their systems as well as choosing Django templates for its Google App Engine.  They also rapidly built Django support into it.  Rails hasn’t even hit the radar.

Rails Has Huge Support From The Tech Industry

Similar to the above but I knew you’d never read through anything longer than a few paragraphs so I put this shit here.

Rails attracts disaffected, immature hippies and divs.  No major company has embraced Rails for anything serious.  The only ‘companies’ that have embraced Rails are the fluffy-bunny brigade of non-companies.  They make money but they’re the technological equivalent of the Care Bears:

  • Twitter – for inane bullshit.
  • 43 Things – You put the things you want to do in life.  Personally?  I just do them!
  • Amazon – I almost shit myself when I saw this.  Until I read the details about it:
  • UnSpun is a new service from Amazon that puts workers from the Mechanical Turk and the UnSpun community at work finding the top, best, favorite things in any category.
  • Sounds like a world beater.  Really taking over Amazon there aren’t you.

Django Copied Rails

No, it didn’t – that was my controlled response to this ridiculous statement.  My natural response had a lot more ‘beating YOU in the face for thinking such a thing’.  Django and Rails were born from very different worlds and purposes.  Neither copied the other.  Although multiple projects have spawned in the Rails community to copy the Django admin interface.  Jealous, much?

Discuss?

Comment or email me.  If you disagree I’ll likely mock you.  If you agree I’ll send a digital kiss.

Rails 2.1 eBook

June 17th, 2008

Ruby

I’m getting bored of Rails now but if you’re interested in an eBook detailing the changes in the latest 2.1 release then you can’t go far wrong with this one:

Free Rails Ebook


Many professionals who are done with their 70-290 and 70-291 prefer writing help e-books for students who are in the middle of their 70-649 or 70-270. These are the ones who write exams like 646-204.

MOG – Ruby Music Lovers

April 8th, 2008

Granted its a bit old but thought I’d throw this one into the air!  Tenuous link, but Rails + Music = MOG.  Similar to Last.fm but built using Ruby on Rails.  What does that mean?  Every self-respecting Ruby/Rails fan should have an account of course! ;)

Ruby Asterisk: 2 Libraries & 2 Docs

March 31st, 2008

AsteriskJust so the Asterisk-Ruby’ists don’t feel left out after my PHP Asterisk post here’s a useful list if you’re wanting to integrate Asterisk with your Ruby (on Rails) app:

  • Adhearsion – Its a full framework on top of Asterisk built in Ruby. Think ‘RAGI-on-steroids’.
  • RAGI – Ruby Asterisk Gateway Interface provides a Ruby interface to Asterisks manager. Similar to my PHP library.
  • RAGI Tutorial – Quick intro at O’Reilly on getitng started with RAGI.
  • Adhearsion Tutorial – Aaaand another one for Adhearsion.

Rails Alternatives

January 10th, 2008

After the recent turmoil I thought it may be worth pointing out a few alternatives to the Rails framework. So here’s 4 Ruby-based web framework alternatives for starters:

  • Ramaze – Has no known bugs and claims excellent stability. Thems fighting words! ;)
  • Camping – A ‘micro-framework’, this is incredibly lightweight offering limited features but great efficiency and speed.
  • Merb – One of the frameworks recommended by Zed this started as Mongrel + ERB, hence the name. Its grown to be a very clean and efficient Ruby framework.
  • Hobo – Not a framework in its own right as its built on top of Rails but it offers a raft of extra functionality to ease and speed up development of your projects.

You may also be interested in the following web frameworks in other languages:

  • Cake (PHP) – One of PHP’s most popular Rails alternatives. More verbose than Rails but providing much of the same functionality.
  • Symfony (PHP) – This is becoming increasingly popular with employers looking for experienced PHP developers.
  • Django (Python) – Hugely popular Python framework and although not the first its overtaken veteran frameworks like Turbogears to be the most popular Python in the box.
  • Turbogears (Python) – An older Python solution which is actually a jumble of technologies stuck together.
  • Sails (Java) – One of the many Java frameworks with a lot of promise.
  • Seaside (Smalltalk) - The onlySmalltalk based framework I know of. I’d really like to have a gander at this at a later date as one of Ruby’s inspirations was Smalltalk so it’d be interesting to see how the forefathers go about framework creation.

If you’re a fan of statistics, reviews and comparisons then maybe you’d like some of these – about as many web framework reviews as you can possibly want!

Facebook API Wins API of the Year

December 29th, 2007

Facebook LogoIf you’ve never heard of Programmable Web then I suggest you take a look. Its a huge directory of all the major APIs on the web open for development. They’ve decided to award the Best API of the Year to the Facebook site. It won based on its openness, audience, money-making potential, viral features, modularity and metrics.

This got me thinking of ideas to put into a new Facebook app but before I jump in at the deep end I’m going to start small with a few quizzes that can plu gin to my existing sites then build from there.

Interesting side note for Ruby/Rails developers: There is an API interface for you to with rFacebook.

Failing that you could just get someone else to do it for you by getting one of the many Facebook Developers to do it for you.

The :dependent option expects either :destroy, :delete_all, or :nullify

December 28th, 2007

For anyone else suffering this issue in their Rails app lately since the upgrade I’ve traced it to a deprecation in “acts_as_rateable” and “acts_as_taggable” which both use the value “true” for the dependent parameter instead of one of those listed.

The simple ‘hack’ to fix this is to replace “true” with “:destroy”. You’ll find the offending lines around here:


./vendor/plugins/acts_as_taggable/lib/acts_as_taggable.rb:17: has_many :taggings, :as => :taggable, :dependent => :destroy
./vendor/plugins/acts_as_rateable/lib/acts_as_rateable.rb:12: has_many :ratings, :as => :rateable, :dependent => :destroy

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‘Newbies’ First 2 Months

October 12th, 2007

RubyI so wanted to avoid using that horrendous ‘N’ word in any part of my blog but I needed something short for the title.

Anyway – TAW made an interesting post on his first 2 months on Rails and I sympathise with many of his points but for a different reason. Most of the issues he raises aren’t really a problem when you know the Ruby/Rails way of doing it. Which sounds incredibly dismissive so I apologise but it is the way learning any language. Most difficulties are often more to do with trying to program in your ‘native’ Java, Python, PHP using Ruby – it just doesn’t work. Once you get to know Ruby and Rails more and more it eventually becomes clear that Ruby has its own way of doing things – this often means many disheartening setbacks when you realise your amazing whizz-bang class that cooks your dinner can be done in a single line of clever Ruby as opposed to the mountainous 30 line monster you built over a few days.

It’d be worth having a book, blog, website dedicated to just one thing: Showing the Rails/Ruby way of doing common tasks. To save these stumbling blocks for people new too the language and framework. Any volunteers? :)

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