Taking the first steps with RoR

This evening I took my first steps with RoR. After watching the "Putting Flickr on Rails" movie I thought: "Hey that doesn't look that hard! " So I downloaded all libraries from the RoR website.
But how to continue? What kind of IDE can be used to program Ruby in? At first I thought of an Eclipse plugin (there are a couple), but after a while I found a project based on Eclipse called RadRails. It helped me getting started and I was up and running in no-time.

What better way is there, to try a sample and play around with the code to see what happens. Instead of creating the Flickr application in 5 minutes, like they tell you at the RoR website, it took me a little over an hour, but I managed to create my own web 2.0-ish Flickr application and setup the Rails environment on my laptop. I guess that's not that bad for a first try.. it's quite fast actually!

My next goal is to dig into the framework a little more. See if I can find something to use in combination with Hippo CMS. I will keep you posted!

Looking into Ruby on Rails

Since I've been very busy lately, I have not been able to find time to dig into development techniques like Ruby on Rails. RoR seems to be quite hot these days.
After reading Ugo's blog about Ruby for Java programmers it made me even more curious. Since I wanted to experiment with other techniques and combine them with Hippo CMS I think Rails might be nice to start with. After doing some research I found out that Stuart Eccles was already working on a WebDAV plugin for Rails. The plugin is not released yet, but when that happens, I am going to give it a go. In my opinion it would be nice to have a sample of how to connect Rails with Hippo CMS. I hope it's going to be released sone, so I can try and write some documentation about how to connect RoR with Hippo CMS. I'll keep you posted!

Firefox extension: Server switcher

While browsing the Firefox extensions archive, I found this very nice developer extension called Server Switcher made by Czedik-Eysenberg.
It enables you to easily switch between sites on your development and live server(s), so you will immediately see the differences. I've played with it a little bit and it's a great tool to use! I would really recommend it to everybody.

Monkey business

Last week I went to the Apenheul in Apeldoorn. The Apenheul is a zoo mainly for monkeys. Some of the smaller monkeys are free to walk among the visitors in some areas. This gives you a great opportunity to make some nice pictures!



For more pictures check out my photo album at Flickr.

Let's do everything with AJAX!

Is everybody running wild now with the Web 2.0 hype? I hope not! The people from AjaxLaunch came up with a new idea. Hey! Let's create an OS that is AJAX aware. Their new project is called ajaxOS. As their website states:

ajaxOS is a Linspire-based operating system with some revolutionary new features to support the adoption of web-based software. Some of the cool new things you can expect to see on ajaxOS include:

• Automatic launch of AJAX software when clicking on a supported filetype.


• Ability to save files to virtual storage.


• Ability to navigate through a file browser to the files uploaded to virtual storage as well those on your local computer.

While watching Michael Robertson's presentation on AJAX software, he talks about some nice advantages of using AJAX for your applications, but do we really want/need to have an OS that is AJAX aware? That will use AJAX applications to process our documents? I would rather love to see all big browser manufacturers come together and decide on a standard and keep to that. Wouldn't that make live much easier?? :-)

Sure, for some applications, AJAX can be usefull, but i'm not sure if you want to use AJAX for everything. Then there is one other thing that we'll have to keep in mind. Think of all the problems that webdevelopers are facing each day, while trying to create Javascript applications that are supposed to work on all major browsers. The applications from ajaxlaunch do not work on IE or Opera at the moment, because they like to promote Firefox as a browser and they will probably have some issues with running their software on IE. I think that promoting Firefox is a great idea, but if they really want this to be a succes, I guess they will have to start supporting IE soon, so the majority of people can start using it.

Let's just wait and see if people are really interested in running all their applications withing their browser. I guess the future will tell.