Useful Javascript/PHP/Ruby resource, with lots of tutorials and code samples… now even prettier 🙂
Category Archives: programming
“Programmers Wikipedia” Coming Soon
stackoverflow.com is a new project from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, intended to be “the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit”. Worth keeping an eye on…
Java fighting a losing battle
Interesting article from Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on how the Java world is leveraging dynamic languages such as Ruby and PHP in order to remain relevant in the web application world. The obvious question is, though, whether using JRuby has enough advantages over using Ruby or PHP in a plain Linux environment without a JVM.
Today Sun is investing in JRuby Ruby and Jython Python support for its Java EE solution; the IBM Websphere group has realized the ineffectiveness of the Java EE platform for running modern Web workloads and has invested heavily in Project Zero which aims to make big blue a Web 2.0 player and initially delivers support for Groovy and PHP; BEA has also had some incubation projects going but with the upcoming sale to Oracle it is unclear whether any of those efforts will materialize.
Andi on Web & IT: Java is losing the battle for the modern Web. Can the JVM save the vendors?
I’ve used Rails. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Interesting article on how Rails features can be more of a hindrance than a help in many situations. Compared here with Django, which can be cleaner and more lightweight.
Some of the bits and pieces that come bundled with Rails are just plain wrong, the Javascript helpers being one example. The abuse of HTTP by default in some of the scaffolding code being another. Oh, and the markup coming out of various helpers as well. In trying to help the application developer Rails gets in the way of the professional webstandards types.
Morethanseven » Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django
Creator of Ruby on Rails pays backhanded compliment to PHP
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, praises PHP for being adequate for “small chores”. Wow, what a compliment! Perhaps someone should suggest to Dave that Rails is okay too, as long as you don’t care about performance.
Creator of ELIZA dies
Joe Weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest examples of Artificial Intelligence, has died. Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the “virtual therapist”, which I’ve played around with in various implementations over the years. It inspired me to investigate Lisp, so for that reason alone I hold Weizenbaum in high regard.
“A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind”
Investigating Lua
I’m getting involved in an open source Mac project, YMail, and as part of my research I’ve been checking out Lua. From the Lua homepage,
“Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.”
The project is a Mac interface to Yahoo! Mail, and we need a nice way to deal with the mainly text-based interactions between the desktop and web application. Objective C, unfortunately, is not particularly suited to text-processing, hence the need for a hybrid solution.
It’s still very early days yet, but I’ll post progress updates on this blog.
Question
Why are classic computer texts so expensive?