Mischa Kroon : Ruby and Ruby on Rails

SASS and CoffeeScript For .NET And Visual Studio

Mischa Kroon — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 10:43:00 GMT

About a month ago I started diving into the world of Rails again . As I said in that blog post, Rails has always had much thought leadership and has always been a hip way to develop. Now 2 of the main new technologies that where discussed in that blog...(read more)

Ruby On Rails 3.1 RC4

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:38:45 GMT

Let the fun begin Ok diving into Rails after not having touched it in a while feels a bit painful to be honest. Getting Started Using the guide on: http://rubyonrails.org/download I got off to a good start. Picking the latest version of Ruby + the rails...(read more)

Ruby on Rails almost on Version 3.1

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 14:53:56 GMT

Introduction I’m finally granting myself some time again to write about the interesting things that I run across in development. Its always interesting to see what the Rails world is doing to see what's hip in development, because the Rails folks...(read more)

Developer Candy: Faster, Iron and Browser Ruby

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:32:27 GMT

This week there are 3 pieces of candy which are all sort of related, they are all talking about ruby Candy nr 1: Faster ruby Ruby for windows has long been available as a 1 click installer, this one click installer is based on Visual C++ version 6 which...(read more)

*** You! The story of Ruby on Rails

Mischa Kroon — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:00:33 GMT

Ruby on rails is one of those technologies that just took of where a lot of other different technologies didn't do anything. I would like to share my insights about why this technology blossomed where a lot of others failed. First of all they did...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC vs ASP.NET(Webforms) vs Ruby On Rails

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:13:58 GMT

Introduction What is MVC MVC stands for: Model (database) Controller (business logic) View (what you see + view logic) It is used to separate the logic from a web application and other types of applications into these 3 logical parts. There are a lot...(read more)

A very nice opinion piece about: google and agile programming

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:22:00 GMT

An article by Steve Yegge who I actually didn't know until he was included in a question session with some of the big names in the software industry a while back. A very good writer, anyway the article: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile...(read more)

A DAL layer that blows me away... ( Actionpack for .Net )

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:14:00 GMT

Watch this and be blown away as well: http://www.wekeroad.com/actionpackintro.html A DAL which creates classes for Stored procedures, tables etc. And all that is needed to set it up is a * in a file. Home of this DAL layer: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki...(read more)

Some links and tutorials about Django

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:17:00 GMT

2 Articles about Django from 2 different people:

Django: first impressions - overview with links

Django: first impressions - technical overview

The first one covers a lot of ground through it's links and is a pretty good starting point for Django.

The main upside of Django is that it gives you a very nice Admin interface with almost no work + it has a pretty nice template language.

Developments in Ruby - Part 2 - Ruby and DotNet

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 14 May 2006 11:02:00 GMT

I'm hearing some people think:

Ok cool that Ruby is happening and all that but we are a DotNet Community site.
Very true, but there are quite a few links to the DotNet world going on and developing at quite a nice speed.

The bridges available now are:
http://rubydotnet.sourceforge.net/ ( - 2003 )
http://www.saltypickle.com/RubyDotNet/ ( - 2004)

And under active development and most promising:
RubyClr from: www.iunknown.com ( active )
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyclr

This seems to be very usable, he already has some advanced things like Databinding ActiveRecord ( Ruby ORM ) and a huge amount of other stuff working.
There unfortunately isn't a recent download link at the moment so for this we will have to wait.

The bad thing of these solutions is that there is the performance penalty of using the Ruby interpreter for executing Ruby code.
there are also some other solutions in the works which are full blown compiler implementations.

Ones I'm aware of:
Wilco Bauwer is working on a IronRuby compiler.

Also a university in Australia has a Microsoft sponsored project going on for a Ruby.Net compiler.

These 2 currently aren't ready for production or even have any releases out, but check back in a couple of months to see how far along they are :)
Offcourse there is also another way to use Ruby in .Net apps and that is by the scripting bridge already

This can be done using ActiveScriptRuby and then enabling the good old MS Active scripting engine.

Offcourse one can also use this technique to enable other languages like:
http://www.mvps.org/scripting/languages/

Developments in Ruby - Part 1 - Editors

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 09 May 2006 12:53:00 GMT

Ruby's star is rising fast at the moment.

It's star is rising fast it even has the thought leadership at the moment according to Don Box.

IDE support is rising for it as well in the form of free editors and paid editors alike.

RadRails is going strong in the Eclipse camp, this isn't really a Ruby perse editor but an editor made especially for Ruby on Rails.
Which is also playing a very big part in getting Ruby out to the world.

The editor is good but there is still a lot of room for improvement when your main issue for productivity is a key combo to switch views.
Which in this case means switching from controller to view to model since we are talking about a MVC framework with Rails.

It is a great feature though :)

A new player in the field is, Sapphire in Steel which is an editor plugin for VS 2005 which hits a bit closer to home for me :)
They already seem to have a first draft of a debugger running, code completion and quite a few other things are also on their roadmap.

Looking very promising....

In the commercial arena, it looks like: Arachno Ruby is hard to beat.

But this isn't all, there are also some project underway for getting Ruby running on our sweet lil CLR.
Hopefully I will be able to give an overview of whats coocking in this department soon.

Warning !!! - IE behaviour modified on: Active X / Flash / Movie content + Solutions

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 01:21:00 GMT

Microsoft says that, from now on, ActiveX control activation will require that, "when a web page uses the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements to load an ActiveX control, the control's user interface is blocked until the user activates it. If a page uses these elements to load multiple controls, each interactive control must be individually activated."

This effects:
ActiveX controls, Adobe Reader, Firefox plug-ins, Java applets, QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, etcetera

Excerpts from: http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/ip_aadahdadhj_jf/

How to get around it:
use document.write to write the tags.

solutions:
http://blog.deconcept.com/flashobject/

http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/

The MSDN Link

Ruby on Rails finally gets it's editor

Mischa Kroon — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 05:18:00 GMT

One of the big things in stopping people from adapting Ruby on Rails is it's lack of a good editor.

Now it seems that this is a thing of the past.

Some people have made it possible to make Dreamweaver mx 2004 into a good Ruby on Rails editor.

The howto for rhtml files.

The howto for intellisence on .rb files.

This is a very big step for Ruby on Rails.

More about Ruby on Rails and comparing it to Asp.Net will come later.

MySql developments

Mischa Kroon — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 10:54:00 GMT

Interesting development going on currently surrounding MySql every ones favorite sql 92 / ACID incompliant database.

MySql AB has recently transfered the license of MySql from LPGL to PGL.
For those not so well informed in what the difference is:
"using the Library GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs."
And offcourse GPL code may not be used in anything which isn't licensed with a GPL compatible license.

MySql is offcourse dually licensed Commercial + GPL so if you want to use it for anything commercial then you have have to pay up, unless your making use of the web loophole:

"At present, companies that distribute GPL-licensed software must make the source code publicly available, including any modifications they've made. Though the rule covers many businesses that use GPL-licensed software for commercial ends, it doesn't cover Web companies that use such software to offer their services through the Web, as they're not actually distributing the software."

Ok, so the whole thing became a lot less .Net friendly :P

Now there is a new development on the MySql horizon: Oracle buys INNO DB

Which looks like a very tactical move by Oracle to crush MySql...
MySql 5 which just went into release candidate mode, might have looked a bit too much like a "real database".

All things said be very aware of where MySql is going... and if you have alternatives for a new project I suggest you have a good look at them.

Things might get ugly around MySql soon.

So what is this web 2.0 anyway ?

Mischa Kroon — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:42:00 GMT

I saw a good definition of Web 2.0 today through Curt Hibbs blog, from O'Reilly:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.