Less is more for Ruby on Rails, inventor says
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Developer of the important Web application framework says he won't add much to the next version.
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Slim gains from low-latency RAM don't justify a steep price.
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Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
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In his latest blog post, P&aacute;draic Brady talks about a "sweeter alternative" to using Smarty for your site's templating - Template Lite.    Use the term Template Engine in a PHP forum and the word "Smarty" will inevitably crop up. I like Smarty but, similar to a few PHP libraries, it's very bloated.   I try to keep my applications lean and mean - small, fast, and adaptable. Unfortunately, Smarty disagrees with my needs. It's bloated design while packing a mighty punch, uses a chunk of memory and processor time I dislike. Since I also develop open source apps which end up on shared hosts, my concerns are even more justified.   Enter Mark Dickenson. Mark is the developer of a Smarty alternative: Template Lite.    He talks about what Template Lite is and what kinds of advantages it has over Smarty, including staying try to its name. P&aacute;draic measures it as not only being faster but also having 50% of the memoery footprint that Smarty does. He seems to favor it for those places when he just needs something light and easy on a site.
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David Pogue explores the time-saving qualities of macro software.
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Sandro Zic recently gave a presentation on Java and PHP, and posted his slides here. I didn't attend his talk, so I don't have all the facts, but I would like to comment on one of his slides [...]. First, a minor point. Limited or no OOP has rarely stopped any software from being enterprise-ready. Most modern operating systems continue to be written in C, and the large Cobol programs running on mainframes that manage your bank accounts and insurance do not use OOP. [...] Let's address some of his other criticisms: Virtually no multi-threading, Lack of maintenance tools, and Immature frameworks.
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Chip maker plans for smaller, faster, less power-hungry processors.
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On his blog, Stuart Herbert has a quick tip showing how to mimic a feature of Ruby on Rails:   I'm still working on the next article in my series looking at PHP on servers, so in the mean time, check out this simple way to emulate Ruby's nice way of handling separate getter, setter and state query methods in PHP.   He admits his example isn't as elegant as the Ruby method, but it does get the job done. Code for the method is included in his post ready for cut and pasting.
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On the devthatweb blog, there's a new post from Pat Nakajima with a recipe for deploying a PHP application with the help of Capistrano (the Ruby on Rails tools for deploying web applications).   Recently though, I was working on a PHP project, and I decided that the time had come to rewrite my Mint recipe to allow deployment of any PHP project, totally independent of Rails. I set to work, and I'm happy to share the result.   The example makes it a simple matter of using the command "cap deploy:php" to use the recipe and push out your PHP application.
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There are three projects in the Ruby world that really stood out this summer:  JRuby, Mongrel, and Ruport.  It's not so much what they've done in terms of development (though that's been impressive), but how well they've communicated.  This is something that a lot of projects don't do as well, so I wanted to take a look at what they've done in hopes that more projects might follow their lead.
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Optical links will be cheaper, quieter, and smaller than copper ribbons, company says.
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Why all the buzz around this development framework? Because creating database-driven Web apps can be faster and simpler. See how Rails works, complete with introductory code, in this excerpt from O'Reilly Media's Ruby on Rails: Up and Running.
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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates touted on Monday Microsoft's plans to build a declarative modeling language that could greatly reduce the need to code.Speaking at Microsoft's 2008 Office System Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., Gates acknowledged work was afoot on such an endeavor, although he described the effort as a five- to eight-year project.With the declarative language project, the goal is to make programming declarative rather than procedural. "Most code that's written today is procedural code. And there's been this holy grail of development forever, which is that you shouldn't have to write so much [procedural] code," Gates said. "We're investing very heavily to say that customization of applications, the dream, the quest, we call it, should take a tenth as much code as it takes today.""You should be able to do things on a declarative basis," Gates continued. But this has not caught on partially because of weak data models -- first codicil and then relational. Stronger data models since have emerged, such as rich schemas around XML as well as modeling work being done by Microsoft and others, Gates said. "We're bringing the data models up to be much, much richer, and we think in that environment, a lot of business logic can be done in a declarative form. Now, we haven't totally proven this yet. We're doing a lot of internal developments ourselves that way," including some Microsoft business applications, he said."We're not here yet saying that [a declarative language has] happened and you should write a ton less procedural code, but that's the direction the industry is going," Gates said. "And, despite the fact that it's taken longer than people expected, we really believe in it. It's something that will change software development but more like in a five- to eight-year timeframe than overnight," he said.Top Microsoft Technical Fellows, including Brad Lovering, are working on the declarative modeling language project, Gates said.A published report has referred to the project as the "D" programming language being built as part of the company's Oslo modeling project. But Gates did not specifically mention the name "D" or Oslo.
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Blog: It's only a 2.5-inch prototype, but it's a first
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The Story: Java, the oldest new programming language around, is falling out of favor with developers. When it comes to developing the increasingly common rich Internet applications, Java is losing ground to Ruby on Rails, PHP, AJAX and other cool new languages. And there are even reports that Microsoft?s .Net, of all things, is pushing Java out of the enterprise. Makes you wonder whether Sun was smart to change its stock-ticker code to JAVA last summer.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Simply put, developers are saying that Java slows them down. ?There were big promises that Java would solve incompatibility problems [across platforms]. But now there are different versions and different downloads, creating complications,? says Peter Thoneny, CEO of Twiki.net, which produces a certified version of the open source Twiki wiki-platform software. ?It has not gotten easier. It?s more complicated,? concurs Ofer Ronen, CEO of Sendori, which routes domain traffic to online advertisers and ad networks. Sendori has moved to Ruby on Rails. Ronen says Ruby offers pre-built structures ? say, a shopping cart for an e-commerce site ? that you?d have to code from the ground up using Java.Another area of weakness is the development of mobile applications. Java?s UI capabilities and its memory footprint simply don?t measure up, says Samir Shah, CEO of software testing provider Zephyr. No wonder the mobile edition of Java has all but disappeared, and no wonder Google is creating its own version (Android).These weaknesses are having a real effect. Late last month, Info-Tech Research Group said its survey of 1,850 businesses found .Net the choice over Java among businesses of all sizes and industries, thanks to its promotion via Visual Studio and SharePoint. Microsoft is driving uptake of the .Net platform at the expense of Java," says George Goodall, a senior research analyst at Info-Tech.One bit of good news: developers and analysts agree that Java is alive and well for internally developed enterprise apps. ?On the back end, there is still a substantial amount of infrastructure available that makes Java a very strong contender,? says Zephyr?s Shah.The Bottom Line: Now that Java is no longer the unchallenged champ for Internet-delivered apps, it makes sense for companies to find programmers who are skilled in the new languages. If you?re a Java developer, now?s the time to invest in new skills.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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My rich desktop experience is richer than yours At the Mix07 conference in London last week, Scott Guthrie, co-inventor of ASP.NET and Microsoft's general manager for the technology, presented the latest plans for ASP.NET and Silverlight and took a swipe at the competition in the process.â¦
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PHP Magazine has a new posting this morning showing ythat yet another story that vindicates the growing popularity of LAMP-based products to cut down costs and provide effective solutions, Bill Welty, the CIO of California's Air Resources Board (ARB) writes about how the usage of open source products helped reduce their cost estimates from six-hundred to fifty-nine (yes, fifty nine dollahs) and that too, with no ongoing requirement for annual maintenance costs.