Tag: rails

Templating Systems

I’ve been thinking about templating systems a lot recently. By templating systems I mean technologies that allow you to mix some data with some fixed text to produce some kind of output. One obvious use is in creating dynamic web pages where, for example, you would create a row in a table for each item… Continue reading Templating Systems

Web Frameworks Night – Report

So last night was the Web Frameworks NIght. A great time had by all. Many thanks to the organisers. We had talks on three frameworks – Catalyst, Django and Ruby on Rails. My overwhelming impression was how similar all three frameworks are. There really seems to be little to differentiate them. As always the Perl… Continue reading Web Frameworks Night – Report

Java Programmers Embrace Ruby

Bruce Tate’s book Beyond Java has been published and there’s quite a lot of publicity for it appearing on the web. For example this article by Chris Adamson on the OnJava site. In the article Adamson interviews a number of well-known Java programmers about the future of Java. The replies seem pretty unanimous that Java’s… Continue reading Java Programmers Embrace Ruby

London Web Frameworks Night (Update)

The London Web Frameworks night has proved to be very popular. So popular, in fact, that the organisers have had to change venue. It will now take place in the New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University. See Dean’s post for more details. This means that signup has been re-opened for the time being. But… Continue reading London Web Frameworks Night (Update)

London Web Frameworks Night

November is shaping up to be an interesting month in London. Not only is there the London Perl Workshop that I mentioned yesterday, but Dean Wilson has organised a London Web Frameworks Night on November 17th. Three experts will be discussing the major MVC frameworks for Perl (Catalyst), Python (Django) and Ruby (Rails). And it’s… Continue reading London Web Frameworks Night

ActiveRecord Does It Wrong

I’m listening to the keynotes on the final day of EuroOSCON and David Heinemeier Hansson is talking about the secrets of Ruby on Rails. He talks about how they promote “convention over configuration” and how that means that you don’t have to describe the same object attribute multiple times. This is a great idea, but… Continue reading ActiveRecord Does It Wrong

Databases and Metadata

Following on from my previous post let’s take a closer look at the kinds of metadata that you might put into a database and how an Object-Relational Mapping layer (like Class::DBI, ActiveRecord or Hibernate) might make use of it. We’ll start with the most obvious stuff and work our way down to less common features.… Continue reading Databases and Metadata