PUBLIC MARKS from amyrussell with tag ruby

As I've mentioned here a few times, I have a book coming out, "Professional Ruby on Rails", available later this month. If you'd like a sneak peek, Wrox has put some samples online as PDF files. You can also just buy the book.

I'm sure you're familiar with Duck Typing, in particular as espoused in the Ruby world: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I would call it a duck." Nothing is an unmitigated good, but Duck Typing, or designing against interfaces, is generally a good thing.

So, while most of you were off celebrating the holidays, Dietrich was off killing a duck, or at least Duck Typing. Personally, I always thought that the goose was the traditional holiday bird.. shows what I know.

In this series of posts, I’m going to walk through the implementation of an interesting Ruby problem, namely, using metaprogramming to create a small DSL-like syntax for specifying tests. Here’s the problem as I notice it in my own unit testing: I tend not to go back and ensure that multiple input values for a method work — worse, I don’t often check for error conditions or possible corner cases.

For the second year in a row at the Chicago No Fluff Just Stuff conference, I was blown away by Neal Ford. An application architect and "meme wrangler" for ThoughtWorks, Ford is a conference-circuit regular with a conversational speaking style lots of smart stuff to share. About half of his talks this weekend in Itasca tackled such technical topics as service-oriented architecture, domain-specific languages and Ruby/Groovy/jRuby. The other half addressed more general developer concerns: strategies for improving your code and, more importantly, your productivity

I'm currently working on my third technical book (Professional Ruby On Rails, available in February, wherever fine technical books are sold). Each one has had a slightly different process, in chronological order...

Not exactly Ajax related, but I thought I'd share it since it might prove useful. I've been evaluating a few Rails IDE's for my firms lately, including IntelliJ IDEA 7.0. On Linux, it has been an underwhelming experience. Specifically, there are two problems that get in the way of productive work:

Over the last month or two I've noticed some definite trends in the sorts of questions that clients and prospective clients are asking my company (Pathfinder). Comparing notes with friends and competitors, it seems that the following technologies are really picking up steam towards the second half of 2007:

I almost missed this article in Ajax Magazine about Pibb, a commercial Ajax-based communications center (chat, channels, etc.). The client is all GWT and uses a Python web server and some Ruby for data persistence. That's right, no Java GWT services on the back end.