Ruby on Rails 1.1 has been released.
Dion Hinchcliffe has posted a blog entry at the end of which he asks the question, will it be a nail in the coffin for .net and Java?
Rails certainly looks beautiful. It is fully object oriented, with built in O/R mapping, powerful AJAX support, an elegant syntax, a proper implementation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern, and even a Ruby to Javascript converter which lets you write client side web code in Ruby.
However, I don’t think it’s the end of the line for C# and Java by a long shot. Even if it does draw a lot of fire, there is a heck of a lot of code knocking around in these languages, and there likely still will be for a very long time to come. Even throwaway code and hacked together interim solutions have a habit of living a lot longer than anyone ever expects. Look at how much code is still out there in Fortran, COBOL and Lisp, for instance.
Like most scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP and so on, Ruby is still a dynamically typed language. For this reason it will be slower than statically typed languages such as C#, C++ and Java. So it won’t be used so much in places where you need lots of raw power. However, most web applications don’t need such raw power in the business layer. The main bottleneck in web development is database access and network latency in communicating with the browser, so using C# rather than Rails would have only a very minor impact on performance. But some of them do, and in such cases the solutions often have different parts of the application written in different languages and even running on different servers. One of the solutions that we have developed, for instance, has a web front end in PHP running on a Linux box, with a back end application server running a combination of Python and C++ on a Windows server.
Rails certainly knocks the spots off PHP though…
Posted at 21:07 on 29 March 2006.
Tagged:
Rails
According to this beauty from Microsoft Word, I have spent eight thousand, one hundred and sixty five years editing this document — since December 2004.
Conclusive proof that time travel is possible…?
Posted at 13:13 on 24 March 2006.
Tagged:
error'd
Well I’ve finally done it. I took delivery of my brand new Kinesis keyboard today. It’s fully ergonomic — the keys are in curved bowls that are contoured to the shape of your hands — but man, it has prompted a few interesting comments to say the least.
My first impression is that it is going to take a little bit of getting used to. The general consensus of the blogosphere seems to be that you spend the first three days swearing at it then the rest of your life swearing by it. Quite what I end up thinking of it after thirty days remains to be seen, but I rather suspect that it will on the whole be pretty positive. I have it on a 30 day sale or return basis, so if I decide it’s not worth the money, I can send it back.
I’ll write a fuller review in a couple of weeks’ time once I have some idea of where it’s going. In the meantime, I’ve put my plans to switch to Dvorak on ice for the time being. However, you can switch the keyboard layout on the fly between QWERTY and Dvorak, or even re-map it to something totally esoteric if you like. So watch this space…
I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and move over to using a Dvorak keyboard layout.
Everyone thinks I’m crazy doing this but there are some good sound reasons for it, notably that apparently it’s more comfortable. The traditional qwerty layout is actually far from optimal — it was not designed for either comfort or speed and it involves a good deal more finger travel than the DSK. People who successfully make the switch generally report that even if they don’t notice an increase in overall speed, they do find Dvorak to be both more comfortable and more accurate.
As you would expect, it feels quite awkward at present, since I’m fairly new to the game. Going from about 60-70 words per minute to about ten is a bit of a pain, but I’m slowly but surely picking up a bit of momentum as I persevere. It seems that a lot of people give up in frustration rather than sticking it out to the point at which they are good at it. Apparently if you keep going back to the qwerty layout while you are re-training, though, it really slows you down a lot, and this seems to be where most people fall over.
Switching is technically fairly easy as every operating system includes it as an option, and you can stick some labels on your keys with the new layout, as I have done. Unfortunately, Windows only provides you with Dvorak layouts for US English, which means no pound or euro symbols. For some strange reason, it seems to have escaped the attention of some Americans that 95% of the world’s population do not live in the U S of A. Evidently, some such Americans work at Microsoft. However, a UK layout is available for download here.
I’ll be blogging my progress and thoughts on the transition over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
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