Making sense of Ruby
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An IntelliSense Cure for Method Madness? Hands on We were six months into the project before we even realised we had a problem. Until that point, we had assumed IntelliSense was a trivial matter that could doubtless be wrapped up in an afternoonâs coding. After all, how hard can it be to program some lists of names that drop down when someone types a dot?â¦
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It must be the season for big announcements, because they seem to be flying right now.  I'd like to point out two of them from the Ruby community.
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Sometimes, it's just not enough to sit and try to teach theory about something in programming - it's better to just jump right in and take things as they come. That's what Harry Fuecks thinks, at least in his latest post on the SitePoint PHP Blog - a look at the "Joy of Regular Expressions".   He does go over a bit of the theory and why they are so invaluable, but it's a short section before he gets to the heart of the article - working with regular expressions for:  positive matching matching all instances in a given string finding an exact match matching the start of a string validation of the contents of a string checking the length of a string  There's simple examples included for each of the items to help you get an idea of how they'd work.
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Work begins on a Perl 6 regexp parser, and Unicode manipulation of strings prompts discussion on the language list.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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With RubyConf 2007 coming up this weekend, it's no wonder that the 2008 regional conference schedule is starting to flesh out.  the Gotham Ruby Conference hasn't mad an official annoucement yet, but should be in April.  Folks on the West Coast will be happy to hear that there are rumblings of two or three California based Ruby conferences.read more
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Mike Naberezny has posted a few more articles to the "Rails for PHP Developers" website (based on this book) covering some more of the basics.  There's three new tutorials posted:  Ruby Block Scope - the basics of Ruby block scope, a common point of confusion for PHP developers new to Ruby.  Variable Arguments - an article that shows two common API patterns found in Rails, variable arguments and option hashes, and how to implement them both in PHP.  Regular Expressions in Ruby - a useful reference that maps all of the common PHP regular expression functions to the equivalents in Ruby.    Check out the rest of the site for even more great content.
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Zed rails, Bray dizzy The launch of a low-cost Ruby on Rails integrated development environment from SapphireSteel Software based on Microsoft's Visual Studio comes at a turning point for both the Ruby language and its associated Rails framework. But quite what the turning point will be is open to question.â¦
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his look at the Phrasebook series from Sams Publishing covering Javascript, MySQL, Apache, and, of course, PHP.   I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn't been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I'm going to talk about books 4 in one review.   He looks briefly at the contents for each of the books, pointing out specific areas they seemed particularly helpful in. He doesn't recommend them to someone trying to learn the language right off the mark. These are, as their title implies, just clips and handy snippets of information to help you get to where you're going. You have to know how to get on the road first, though...
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Nefarious Designs continues their object-oriented PHP series with part four posted today, a look at some of the new features that PHP5 brings to the table.    After a welcome break, over the late summer public holiday here in England, here's the final part in my object-oriented PHP series. Sorry about the rather extended pause since "Part 3: Taking Relationships Further".   Having already looked at definition, relationships and taking those relationships further, I'm going to look at how PHP5's new Object Model introduces more advanced functionality.    In this latest part they look at clas constants, abstract classes, object interfaces, and magic methods (including overloading).
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On the SitePoint PHP Blog today Troels Knak-Nielsen asks th3e question "what's so bad about the singleton?" For all of its advantages, is there a darker side of the design pattern when it pertains to global variables.   As I have often taken this stance myself, I found it reasonable that I should be able to argue for it, so I'll try to give an explanation. This is also in part a follow-up on my post from last week, in which I present a way to avoid global symbols, without spending much time on why.   He talks about what they are and how they're commonly used - sometimes with some unpleasant side effects because of their use of globals.
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The Ruport Book Project has announced that they&#8217;ve begun shipping pre-orders of their book. The primary authors, Gregory Brown and Michale Milner, are core developers of the Ruport reporting system for Ruby as well.read more
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Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists. The Parrot folks create some TODOs, hash out math semantics, and discuss cross-compiling. The Perl 6 language folks argue about ranges, roles, pipelines, and PRE and POST hooks.
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The PHP Community is buzzing about a new article, posted on the O'Reilly Ruby blog, about how the author (Derek Silvers of cdbaby.com) made the decision that Ruby on Rails just wasn't right for the project he was working on.    Back in January 2005, I announced on the O'Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby  website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch. [...] The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.   But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this.)    Recounting the rest of the story, Derek mentions the turning point ("Is there anything Rails can do that PHP CAN'T do?") and the speed at which they were able to make up for the two years of lost development time. To helps others make a decision for their project, he also includes seven reasons why he made the decision to switch back, including:   Our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration Don't want what i donÃ¢ÂÂt need I love SQL Programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because *you* are better   There's also been several bloggers in the PHP community that have responded to the article:   Elizabeth Naramore - "Derek Sivers' Article on RoR vs PHP" Paul Jones - "Is there anything Rails can do that PHP cannot do? *No.*" Terry Chay - "Why PHP triumphs over Ruby" Jeff Moore - "Ruby versus PHP or There and Back Again"
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Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
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Well, this is some news I've been wanting to share for a while, but I've had to wait until everything was ready.  During the summer, I spoke at RubyConf*MI, one of the first regional Ruby Conferences (I think San Diego held the only one earlier than the Michigan folks).  At the time, they filmed all the presentations.