Rails Planet
Posted by Doug Mon, 01 Aug 2005 13:08:48 GMT
I notice that the Rails Planet has added my blog! Thanks guys.
Rails and Trails
Posted by Doug Fri, 29 Jul 2005 13:46:57 GMT
Chris Nelson is a fellow Fusion Alliance employee and the author of Trails. He’s speaking at OSCON and wanted to try out his presentation on local interested parties. I was glad to listen because I’m interested in his Trails project and how it correlates to Rails.
As his stated goal is to provide “Domain Driven Development” to Java and drastically reduce the amount of work to produce CRUD apps, I’m impressed. If I were a Java developer, I’d be happy to use something like this to make my apps a lot easier to write.
If I had to choose between Rails and Trails, I’d choose Rails. It really comes down to preferring Ruby over Java. My background is in C and Perl. I prefer dynamic languages. I prefer loosely typed languages. I like Ruby’s iterators and mostly functional nature. I really like Ruby’s module_eval and class_eval. Like Lisp macros, it’s kinda ugly but really nice when you need it.
I’ve said before, much of Rails’ attraction is that it’s built on Ruby. I certainly wouldn’t be interested in PHP on Rails. I could live with Perl on Rails. I’m impressed with Java on Trails, but uninterested in using it.
Fast Feature
Posted by Doug Fri, 08 Jul 2005 16:06:00 GMT
I had a nice Rails success last night. My project has admins and users. The admins create the user accounts and photograph users in a controlled environment. When the admin creates the user, they upload the controlled photo. Additionally, users can upload their own photos. As discussed previously, I have all the code for uploading the photos and such. In this week’s customer meeting, they asked that the users never be able to delete the admin uploaded photos. So with “all this” imaging code written and tested, I had to add in this little feature of protecting admin uploaded images. The success was that it took me less than 30 minutes to code and test this feature. It’s nice to have the code cleanly designed and separated. Without that I think it would have been more difficult to add this restriction in. Another thing is the tests I already had working. As I changed code, I was confident that nothing else broke. The code change was about 4 lines of code. The tests are 4 – 5 times that many lines of code. I love how easy it is to test controllers with process, put, and get helper functions. However, it seems like we need something even higher level to automate testing these longer scenarios: admin creates user, uploads photo, user tries to delete the photo. That’s about 10 lines of test code. I wish it was only like 5.
