cscotta

It's an interesting idea, but based on some early tests it looks like a losing bet to me.

My ping from a dedicated 15mb Qwest circuit to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is between 57ms and 75ms. However, cached DNS resolutions run at around 12ms from our default DNS servers. Even uncached resolutions are still way faster than the round-trip to Google.

Google Public DNS might be worth it if every single one of your DNS queries would result in a cache miss, but otherwise I don't see the performance improvement Google is gunning for.

That said, it is nice to have a public option.

Update - here's a much better article than the one linked, written by DCI's creator (who also helped popularize MVC): http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html

There's no need to sensationalize this. It's not the end of MVC and I'm not sure what's "banished" here. This sort of headline is a depressing trend.

But it is an interesting pattern for software architecture/engineering, and I'm glad to learn about it. I'll admit that after reading this summary I'm not entirely clear on how this marks any sort of revolutionary change in program design. Instead, it strikes me as a mental shift enabled by a few years' reflection on what MVC aspires to be. Indeed, the author says as much: "This may not seem like a really big change and indeed, technically, it is not. However the mental shift is huge!"

I'm not a Java developer, but in Ruby this sounds something like implementing a significant amount of program logic in modules rather than directly in a Merb/Rails/Datamapper/what-have-you model in order to achieve a looser coupling of the data/business logic layer.

So, I dunno. It's a really cool idea, and welcome to HN...but please change the headline to something less sensational/linkbait and more informative like - "Data/Context/Interaction - Thinking Beyond MVC Structure."

That's pretty cool man, congratulations.

Learning the basics of programming is no easy task, so it's great to see that you're diving into it, giving it a try, and putting something out there. That takes a ton of work, but also guts. Way to go.

Good luck as you move forward, and enjoy the ride!

Sorry, but you absolutely need to change this. It's overt copyright infringement. You've provided zero attribution to the content creator, and don't own the rights to the work in the first place.

Ripping off someone's work - whether they're an independent designer or a multinational corporation - is not cool.

Anyway, I tried uploading a PDF to demo the service, but it didn't work; the file uploaded and it redirected me to /manage/[id].php, but the page never fully loaded. So, I'm really not sure what to say but I'm kinda bummed out by that.

It's cool that you've created something to share with us, and I really wish you luck in making it your own and getting it to work. Good luck, and feel free to share it later on!

I believe the roadblock here is the lack of support for automatic garbage collection for applications developed using the iPhone SDK in the mobile OS.

I'm a Ruby developer, not iPhone/Cocoa so this could be way off base, but I believe this is what it came down to in a previous discussion.

This is great to see. MacRuby is accomplishing important work very quickly.

Here are the highlights from the latest Status Report from 0.5, posted by Laurent on Monday at http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-Nov...

----------------------------------------

Enjoy! The final 0.5 release is not far at this point :-)

Highlights:

- rdoc, ri, rack, sinatra are now working.

- DTrace probes are available. Same as in MacRuby 0.4.

- BigDecimal, OpenSSL and JSON support (experimental).

- macrubyc: support for building fat binaries (using the --arch argument).

- New tool: macruby_deploy, to help you deploying a MacRuby application, by ahead-of-time compiling its source code and relocating the MacRuby framework inside the application bundle. One-click Xcode targets provided.

- Lots of bugs fixed, especially related to compatibility, thread-safeness and memory/resource leaks.

I've found Chrome for Mac pretty stable so far, too - but this is my showstopper.

Any time Calibri is requested in text, it displays like this: http://u.phoreo.com/jy.png

The font works fine everywhere else, so I'm not sure what's up. Do you have this problem?

Ask and ye shall receive -

Here's AdBlock (Adsweep): http://adsweep.org/

Here's Greasemonkey (Greasemetal): http://www.mychromeaddons.com/chrome-addon-greasemetal-greas...

The wording of this question (as summarized in the headline) suggests professional negligence on my part for not having spent a year, five, or ten learning Java. I'd like to respectfully disagree.

Ruby is my primary programming language, but I've also built apps and scripts in Python, C, C++, Objective-C, PHP, and Scala.

I'm a firm believer that exposure to a wide variety of programming languages is a great way to experience new constructs, paradigms, and approaches to computer programming, which is why I've spent the past few years branching out. During this process, I've worked with a few languages built atop the JVM (Scala and JRuby), and thus learned a bit of Java, basic language structure / primitives, and some underpinnings of the JVM. I believe that making an effort to understand and employ these various platforms has helped me to become a better programmer.

It sounds as if you're coming from the perspective of an academic advisor. This surprises me, as your question is primarily career-focused. Had Java been forced on me in University, I would have left disappointed by my education and mentally prepared for five years as a junior developer in a cube farm working on obscure, broken internal HR software. Instead, exposure to this variety of languages, architectures, and concomitant development methodologies has taught me a lot about programming / software engineering, and opened my eyes to careers I might not have imagined otherwise.

Circling back to the original question, I can tell you that I live a happy, productive, fulfilling life as a software developer at a great company doing what I love without "knowing Java."

Thanks, jashkenas - this is fantastic.

I spend most of my day as a Ruby developer, but when I'm doing frontend work, the thing I miss most in Javascript is Ruby's incredibly simple, powerful list operations. While most of these have existed in some form for awhile now, I've never seen such a comprehensive implementation in just 5.2kb (minified) of very clean, simple, well-commented code.

This is probably going in every project I work on from here on out. Thanks for putting all of this together.

I saw that you also posted this review of your own app (Gaia GPS, $2.99), claiming that you hadn't tried one of the features:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewConten...

andrewljohnson: * * * * * (five stars)

"The new version of the app is a nice improvement on the original. I particularly like the map bookmarking button, though I haven't used the driving directions yet. The maps from CloudMade are also an improvement on the OSM maps."

What's up with that?

I went ahead and posted this comment on the blog post. It'd be great to be able to at least have a sandbox to build a library for communicating with the API to test out libraries and clients under development. Without something like that, I really don't see open, robust client libraries being built, and driving adoption in applications and around the web.

---

I'm surprised that no one has said this yet, so I'll step up.

This is massively expensive.

Releasing an API without offering developers any way to build client libraries for Ruby, Python, and other languages short of ponying up $60 to test their client (or even offering a sandbox for sample data) is a bit much.

I'd be interested in putting together a Ruby library for interfacing with Alpha that would abstract the work of creating a request and parsing the response, making integration a snap for other developers and enabling deeper integration with Alpha around the web. I've thought a bit about how that might look, too:

  query = WolframAlpha::Query.new(:query => '7.5 parsecs in light years')
  response = query.execute

  response.pods.keys.map(&:title)
  => ['Input Interpretation', 'Result', 'Additional Conversions', 'Comparison as distance', 'Interpretations,' 'Corresponding Quantity']

  response.pods['Result']
  => '24.5 light years'

But with such a strong financial disincentive to develop for the platform, it's not likely that I'll register as a developer to create something like this. Feel free to contact me if terms change.

It looks like the "Try a new browser" options are set based on browsers that are available for your OS. Since IE and Chrome aren't available for Mac (Chrome for Mac's not officially ready), those aren't shown to Mac users.

Thanks, Sahaj - just updated the title.

Datamapper (http://www.datamapper.org) is a great alternative as well.

It's not as full-featured as ActiveRecord, but then it's also not nearly as heavy!

Several companies in Portland are teaming up to offer exactly this.

Comcast has a new plan for $49 that offers a 12mb/2mb cable internet connection along with 4G/WiMAX across the Portland metro area. If you tack on another $20, you get access to Sprint's 3G data network across the country, with the same USB adapter.

It's really a great deal, and you're only paying one company for it. I don't work for any of these companies, but am intrigued by some of the deals that are coming out.

Check it out here: http://www.comcast.com/highspeed2go/

It's a shame, but Metro-Fi in Portland, Oregon was a spectacular failure. I'd suggest that efforts to deploy metro wifi networks focused on the wrong technology at the wrong time.

The project was a partnership between the City and a private company (Metro-Fi), who agreed to put up access points all over town with an emphasis on public spaces, parks, and popular gathering spots.

Access to the network was free, but included HTTP-injected iframe ads and frequent interstitial ads between pageviews. Compounding the woeful experience this provided, the network itself was very slow. Checking anything beyond the complexity of Reddit could become a multi-minute affair. The company also offered Metro-Fi Premium, an ad-free version of the service for around $20/month. It was positioned as a replacement for Comcast or Qwest, but no one took it seriously.

The reach of the network was also quite poor. I could almost never get a signal or acquire a connection if I found an AP - it's the sort of thing you'd regard as the last resort if there were no open APs nearby.

In the end, Metro-Fi went bankrupt, defaulted on their contract, and left the city littered with dozens to hundreds of wireless antennas atop intersections, utility poles, etc. that the city now has to pay to remove (the cost of which was estimated at something like $70,000).

(An alternative project called PersonalTelco.net, a non-profit gang of Portland hackers who wanted to bring fast, free access to popular gathering spaces like coffee shops, bookstores, etc. had much more success in bringing fast access to some of the most popular spots, but I wouldn't include it as a "metro wifi" project in that it focused on a few spaces rather than blanket coverage.)

Several months ago Clear (a partnership between Intel, Sprint, and Comcast) launched WiMAX across the metro area. It's fast. Real-world tests (read: dude with his laptop at a bookstore) came out on par with a DSL landline. It's cheap, at $20/month. And because each antenna has roughly the range of a GSM tower (in fact, most are mounted upon them), the network's range is much greater at a fraction of the cost. And while most laptops lack integrated WiMAX support, people are quite happy to plug in a USB adapter.

It's still too early to see how Clear will fare in Portland, but these factors give them a much better shot at success. I only wish the city would have had such foresight a few years ago and invested in WiMAX instead of wifi.

Can anyone from Atlanta comment on Clear's performance and public opinion?

I guess I'd suggest dropping the "movement" rhetoric unless you are truly promoting non-relational databases as the be-all end-all solution for object persistence for all applications and use cases.

Most advocates of technologies like Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant, Mongo, CouchDB, etc - don't seem to argue this, instead taking a much more responsible approach of suggesting organizations whose needs are best suited by non-RDBMSs check them out, rather than porting everything over whole-hog.

I suppose what I'm suggesting is that the "movement" frame doesn't match the mindset of most proponents of the paradigm. There's nothing political about it - it's just another (very awesome) technology to consider for certain cases.

It's about experimenting and having fun, not making money. Better to state it up front than to go in with dreams of making millions in a month :-).

Perhaps, but not if you're trying to push out an update to existing frustrated users. Also, I've got a feeling that once Apple saw what happened Thing Would Not Go Well.

Just kind of a sad story all around, I guess.

It took me a few hours to sort this all out on my own on Friday, but now that something like an "official" guide for Ruby developers has been released, I'm glad to find that I ended up choosing the preferred path!

After recompiling Ruby 1.9 as a 64-bit binary, installing the 64-bit version of MySQL, and getting the rest of my gems back in shape, things worked quite well.

That said, I'm not looking forward to spending several days helping people out with upgrades at work, haha. This one was quite a bit more involved than I expected.

NB: Had to do the same for Python's MySQL bindings with MySQL-64.

It's really cool that you've poured so much of your time, research, and development into building out this framework. Congratulations on bringing it so far - I can't imagine this being an easy feat.

I have to say, though - I really couldn't see myself using a closed-source framework for any web application, especially one which is quite new. The potential for running into bugs which it's impossible for me to fix is too great, and I can't afford the time and tension involved in waiting for a vendor to offer an update.

As the founder (and at present, sole developer) of a small ISV, it can be difficult balancing requests from customers, the vision of the company, and maintaining existing code alone. This problem would be far more pronounced for someone attempting to build out, maintain, and develop a community around an entire framework. Aside from perhaps Werkzeug (especially when it was first released), I can't think of a web framework that would have been able to thrive without either a growing community of developers and maintainers contributing, or heavy corporate sponsorship.

I know I'm just some guy on the web tapping out a comment, but I think you'd save quite a bit of sanity and find much better adoption by opening up the source, encouraging others to contribute, and empowering more developers to build applications rather than finding themselves frustrated by a bug in a closed framework which they cannot fix. If revenue is a concern for you, perhaps it's worth considering that things tend to work out well for those who succeed in defining new ways of building and deploying web applications (cf. 37Signals, the Django team, JRuby's core team, etc). You might be surprised.

Thanks for sharing the screencasts - good luck!

Scott

I like the idea of a real baseline grid, but...

"Safari 3, Google Chrome, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Internet Explorer 8 all work correctly with some minor differences."

Seems like cross-browser compatibility (including Firefox 2, IE7, and heck if you're making a framework, IE6) would be at the top of the list of your priorities when creating something like this, though ;-).

Not bad if you can get approved.

Really wish this site would bill itself as "Web Development Q&A" instead of "Web Design."

Of the three pages of questions currently on the site, none of them would be better described as "design" than "frontend development."

It's time we granted these separate professions the dignity of their own names instead of forcing everything into the hodgepodge of "design."

Don't worry - it looks like there's an educational/non-profit discount of 40%. So generous!

If only my work were valued at 50¢/word...

Charles and the team are doing a fantastic job bringing Ruby to new platforms and enabling the language to flourish in Java-centric organizations.

It's hard to underestimate the significance of their effort in enabling Ruby applications to run anywhere the JVM does, be it App Engine, Android, or inside a major corporation strapped by IT policy. Along with that, they've brought many new ideas to the language, such as single-file deployment to an application server such as Glassfish using Warble - I like capistrano, but that's brilliant. All of this really is a tremendous amount of work.

Glad to see Robuto in action, and excited to think about what might happen on the platform (especially once the "next steps" features he mentions are implemented).

Kudos!

Oh definitely - sorry, I didn't mean to be flippant or to suggest that dropping indexes on everything were some sort of magic scaling powder. I once worked on an app a client brought in from an outside company that had slapped indexes on every single column in the database (including longtext - it was Postgres). I've never seen something so broken.

But yeah. It's complicated. "Software is hard." But the best thing you can do is become aware of your ignorance, then try to eliminate what you can.

If there are Rails developers who work with applications of any size at all and are not familiar with indexes, the problem isn't scaling - it's lack of knowledge of one's application's stack. The mentality that one's app should magically scale without any idea of what's under the hood is toxic.

Anyway, it doesn't get much simpler than: add_index :users, :account_id