Streamlined - Stop Banging Rocks together

"Stop banging rocks together and build something." HAHAHA I love that tagline!
Streamlined
sounds interesting.. can't wait till it becomes availble (ie, the next OSCON)

Railsconf talks Linky Love

Kevin Clarke of glu.ttono.us has been kindly blogging RailsConf and I'm posting these links here for future reference. Many thanks to Kevin, whom I cannot thank in blog-person as the comments are off :)

so here goes:

1. Dave Thomas Keynote
   
2. Mike Clark - Capistrano
   
3. Ezra Zygmuntowicz - Rails Deployment
   
4. Glen Vanderburg - Testing Migrations
   
5. Mike Clark - Testing Rails Apps
   
6. Nathaniel Talbott - Homesteading: A Thrivers Guide
   
   

A call for better data integration for rails.

Dave Thomas hit the nail on the head on this one:

Data Integration

• Better use of schema - use schema constraints
  
  
  
  • Validation based on the schema (staying DRY)
    
  • Work with database foreign keys
    
    
    
    • It will help with enterprise integration
      
    • Make it easy to define in migrations
      
    • Add belongs_to if FK detected
      
    • Generally make folks feel we care
      
    
    
  
  
• Primary keys
  
  
  
  • Better support for non-integer keys
    
    • Particularly in migrations
    
    
  
  
• Add support for composite primary keys
  
• Support distributed transactions
  
• Standardized attribute-based finders
  
• Non-database models (including JMS/MQ)
  

The rest via Kevin Clarke's glu.ttono.us

HyperCard reborn?

Okay, I've always thought that Smalltalk is an awesome environment, especially Squeak. Only if the Squeak project could get some UI people to make the interface more useable and cleaner looking you'd have had a killer product on yer hands, but no suck luck so far.

But certain folks valiantly fight on!

In any case, back to the matter at hand (no pun originally intended) and that is HandsOn based on Peter Howell's excellent and thought provoking thesis . And that is an environment which I think could kick ass in a major way.

Peter summarises this as follows:

This project is about refining blogs and wikis and bulletin boards. Its about coming up with more forms of network communication. Its about answering the question: "How do you have a conversation amongst a hundred thousand people?" Or even a hundred people. Its a tool to build communication tools. Its about getting the tools out of the hands of the engineers and into the hands of the artists. Its about letting the users build their own tools. Its a visual programming language geared towards building collaborative web applications. It aims to support a new class of designers--community designers: those who are more interested in fostering and nurturing a productive enjoyable community than in any specifics of HTML or databases.

Amen brother!

Now, only if we could have something like this in Ruby. I was day dreaming about an equivalent application cobbled together with a YAML file in lieu of the snazzy squeak front end that you see in the demos (here and here) , and a static processor type thingy which would spit out a camping.rb app file based on this configuration. A visual equivalent would be nice, but that seems to be beyond my own capabilities right now.

So it would go something like this:

[YAML description of a site] --> HandsOFF --> [auto generated Camping app]

dreams are free I suppose eh?

"When in doubt, use brute force."

also,

"We have persistent objects, they're called files."

Ken Thompson is da man! more gems here.