Zibblog » Programming

If you’re ever trying to learn Ruby and Rails

zibbler — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 01:52:14 +0000

Lately, I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails a lot since I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do more java coding after work. I’ve run across a few interesting articles and sites that I thought you might find useful if you’re interested in RoR.

Eclipse Callisto is out

zibbler — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 04:50:53 +0000

For anyone that doesn’t follow that sort of thing, the 3.2 release (Callisto) of Eclipse was released the end of last week. I just started playing around with it at home since I don’t want to destabilize my work setup, and it seems to work fine with all of the plugins that I use on a daily basis. Lately, I’ve found the following add ons to be really good.

PHPEclipse – It’s not super fancy, but it has some nice little features like refreshing an internal web browser on file save.
RadRails – I’ve started playing around with Ruby on Rails and this is another set of plugins that provides some nice integration, especially if you’re a windows user.
Ruby Development Tool (RDT) – RadRails is built on top of this one, which provides a lot of the Ruby editing framework.
Subclipse – Subversion + Eclipse. If you want to use this with Callisto, then I recommend reading this page.

There’s a lot of smaller plugins, but these are the main major ones that I always install. Recently, I started playing around with eclipse plugin development and I found the EclipseZone forums to be a really good place to find answers to detailed questions about anything related to eclipse. At some point, I’ll probably blog about the plugin that I play around with every once in a while for packaging and editing firefox extensions. When the source isn’t quite so hacked up, I’ll throw that up too.

Java 1.5 feature of the day – @Override

zibbler — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 08:09:46 +0000

It wasn’t until I started at Netflix that I had ever tried out any of the java 1.5 specific features. From a language syntax perspective, the main ones (at least the main ones that I can think of off the top of my head) are foreach, annotations, and generics. I’m not going write a long blog post about each of these features. The links on each are pretty good, and if you’d like more information, Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer’s Notebook is a pretty concise look at the changes if you’re already experienced with java. The interesting thing will all of the changes is that all the new syntactic modifications are designed to run within a pre 1.5 JVM. This isn’t incredibly exciting, but it is interesting when considering tradeoffs you have to make in order to keep that consistency. In the end, it means that almost all of the features are just to make life easier for the programmer by adding in some compile time checks and code generation.

When I was going through the listing of java 1.5 warnings that you can enable in Eclipse, I came across the feature @override. This construct’s entire purpose is to keep track of the fact that the method it is annotating is meant to override a superclass. If you change the signature of the method in the superclass so that this method is no longer overriding it, the compiler will generate an error. This is one of those features that I kind of scratch my head about. I want to believe that it is useful and will someday prevent me from refactoring issues when I change APIs or when somebody else changes some API that I am extending, but I can’t remember a time when having this feature would have saved me any time.

Tables are so 2002

zibbler — Mon, 01 May 2006 19:06:28 +0000

Recently, I’ve been playing around with CSS and structured XHTML as a part of reworking this blog and keeping up with “web stuff”. Therefore, I’ve been eagerly anticipating CSS Reboot Spring 2006. It’s mostly a bunch of people who think that HTML should be valid, well formed, and styled using CSS that decided to update their web sites, blogs, etc. and unveil them today. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing (and how could you not be), I’d recommend going over to the reboot site and visiting whatever sites catch your eye. Since I’ve been trying to figure out the design of the zibblog, I had a lot of fun browsing through and picking up ideas for various features and styles of blogs. One of my favorites (and a blog that I enjoy reading), is If..Else which you should really take a look at.

Amazon S3 Based Wiki

zibbler — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 15:52:29 +0000

I was wandering the web before starting my real work this morning and I noticed that someone is working on a Wiki using Amazon S3. It seems like an interesting project with some interesting ideas inherent in it. The whole idea of doing remote content for an application is kind of crazy in some ways when it feels like we’ve all spent a lot of time at some point on caching mechanism and such to avoid taking a performance hit by going to the database which should be a lot more trivial than hitting S3. However, I think that it’s a kind of interesting proof of concept. In some ways, the whole idea of a mashup leverages the idea of using another web application to do something so that you don’t have to. Most of the applications of this that we’ve seen so far involve things like mapping that are overly complex to reinvent for every application on the web, but as everything gets faster and building applications becomes more about mixing and matching building blocks, it doesn’t seem crazy to swap out your own filesystem for a distributed one. Especially if there was a good interface layer.

Too many standards, too little time

zibbler — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 07:37:00 +0000

I was attempting to get caught up on my newsreading last week and and I ended up reading about the release of the spec for Atom 1.0. This sort of thing caused a relative flurry of posts about all the different standards for newsfeeds from blogs and the fact that there are now around 5 (I think) major standards and versions of standards that various newsreaders support. Of course, it got me to thinking about the fact that at some point I want to move this to a “real” website where I can have control over the software and do whatever I want. All of this also led me to an interesting article that ended up being a kind of roundabout discourse on blogging and what it means to be a blogger. I thought it was a fun read so, here’s a link.

Puddin … nuff said

zibbler — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 17:14:00 +0000

Joe’s comment to the post on titles reminded me of the fact that I can create and kill a catch phrase faster than anyone else I’ve ever seen. Should I be proud of that? “puddin” (as in the pudding snacks), “yup”, and “nuff said” are merely some of my victims. A friend was talking about a Vegas trip the other day, which got me thinking about the fact that it is probably been around 4 years since the infamous “Vegas … nuf said” email. Time really flies.

Eclipse 3.1 is out today. After trying out at least 5 prereleases (including the almost final RC4), I’m very impressed with its quality. I’ve gotten my setup at work to use the build automatically feature and it almost never grinds my system to a halt despite the size of the codebase. One of these days, I’m going to build a plugin just for fun. Thinking about the way the application is structured got me thinking the other day if my dream of pluggable feature modules as the next step in software development is somehow just around the corner somewhere. If your application were just made up of a lot of features like Eclipse plugins, it would be easier to outsource.

Some days I feel like Edison. Since I’m already including one link to Warren Ellis, why not link to a little exposition on Fell. It sounds like it should be interesting, even to non-comic people since it isn’t full of superheroes or crazy stuff like that.