A friend of mine recently described why he feels ruby is immature. I, of course, disagree with him. There is much in ruby that could be improved, but the issues he raised are a) intentional design choices or b) weaknesses in specific applications built in ruby. Neither of those scenarios can be fairly described as [...]
A nucleic team is one with small core group of permanent employees, usually just 1 to 3 people, that is supplemented as needed by contractors. The core in a nucleic team is too small to do the anticipated work, even during slow periods of development. The core teams job is two fold, first it implements [...]
In my previous post on this subject I described an approach to versioning the API of a REST/HTTP web service. This approach has significant advantages over the approach that is currently most common (i.e. embedding a version token in the URL). However, it does have some downsides. This post is an attempt to outline those [...]
Ara Howard has discovered that the ActiveRecord validation mechanism does not ensure data integrity.1 Validations feel a bit like database constraints but it turns out they are really only useful for producing human friendly error messages. This is because the assertions they define are tested by reading from the database before the changes are written [...]
My team ran into this problem yesterday where the a particular, very important, request was failing in one of our Rails apps. The failure did did not make much sense and even more confusingly, the same code worked perfectly in the console. As part of debugging the problem we restarted the mongrel cluster, and suddenly [...]
Defining new behavior for core Rails classes in mixins is a common pattern in Rails plugins. This allows for a separation of concerns that improves maintainability and digestability. However, it raises a bit of question about where the mixin inclusion step should take place. Should it happen in the plugin’s init.rb or in the same [...]
Consider a situation where you have a type of resource which always belongs to a resource of another type. How do you model the URI space using Rails? For example, say you have an address resource type. An address is always associated with exactly one user, but a user may have several addresses (work, home, [...]
Rake is a really excellent build tool. It is basically Make on steroids (and minus a few of the annoying inconveniences of make). If you build software of any sort you owe it to yourself to check out Rake. The source of my Rake related euphoria today is that I just used a feature of [...]
This has got to be my favorite RoR error message: 1) Error: test_truth(Admin::EscalationMgt::EscalationViewsControllerTest): ArgumentError: Admin::EscalationMgt is not missing constant EscalationViewsController! Only in Rails would the fact that you are trying to use a constant that does exist be an error.
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Posted 07 March 2007
† Peter Williams
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I have been at my new job for just over a month now so I suppose it is time to post something about it. I joined Absolute Performance at the end of November. We do “operations management solutions” which is marketing speak for helping you – both reactively and proactively – keep your applications, and [...]
