mike.mainguy

Next on my agenda for comparing these two frameworks is package (aka dependency management). Up until the release of Rails3, I would say grails was the hand's down clear cut winner in this regard. Grails was engineered from VERY early on with the idea of dependency management being core to the framework. IMHO, this further illustrates how grails advanced the state of the art by sanding off some of the rough edges off of rails. If I were in charge of an IT department, I still think grails has a bit of an edge from a management perspective, but it does lose out a little in the flexibility department. Ruby (via the gem mechnism) still suffers greatly from "gem hell" problems. Rails3 takes a step in the right direction by making bundler a core part of how applications are configured. Grails, on the other hand, is moving toward using maven as it's standard dependency management solution. In addition, grails has supported this for a number of years now and it works...

In my continuing comparison of ruby on rails to groovy and grails I've discovered another big difference. Grails has excellent support for job scheduling, whereas the existing rails plugins are confusingly complicated. In grails, to set up a job, install the quartz plugin grails install-plugin quartz grails create-job MyJob and edit the new class called MyJob class MyJob { static triggers = { simple name: 'mySimpleTrigger', startDelay: 60000, repeatInterval: 1000 } def group = "MyGroup" def execute(){ print "Job run!" } } Done, you now have a job running inside your application running at a repeating interval. The pluging supports cron-like syntax as well as custom triggers. Rails, on the other had (much like perl ;) has more than one way to do it. The biggest thing I notice is that most of the rails plugins either #1 require you to schedule a unix cron job example or #2 require you to run another ruby process to do the...

As technologist, I'm always keeping my eyes on the market. There's nothing worse from a marketability perspective than being the best chariot wheel repairman when the entire world has moved on to automobiles. If you're going to be in a niche, you better be in one that is HIGHLY lucrative. To this end, I took a look on indeed.com and tried to see how various programming languages stacked up as far as job postings. java, ruby, groovy, c#, php, c, erlang, vb, delphi Job Trends Java jobs - Ruby jobs - Groovy jobs - C# jobs - PHP jobs - C jobs - Erlang jobs - VB jobs - Delphi jobs Obviously this is not comprehensive, but it shows what I "kinda" already knew. C is king, with java taking a large secondary position and C# following up behind java. One thing to note is that that largest percentage shown on that chart is 4%. This roughly means that the market is SO fragmented that a large leader only captures 4%. For the COBOL folks clinging on fo...

Last month, I had a cloud server exploited and couldn't figure out how it happened. After a little investigation, I've got a good news bad news situation. The good news is that I DID manage to contact someone at rackspace who could help me out and they re-enabled my account. The bad news is that the server wasn't pretty. On the upside it must have been hacked by a script kiddie as they did NOT cover their tracks very well at all. On the downside, they did NOT appear to have used the single user account I created and somehow entered through either the rackspace admin network (SPOOKY, inside job?) or one of the default services installed with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (still not good) From my root .bash_history, I noticed the following (the first few lines, may have been me): exit w w ...

I've been refactoring some tests and changed them from using a global set of users/roles defined as fixtures to instead be factories. OK, for java folks I'm going to give you the secret ruby decoder ring. Fixtures = predefined data that you create by manually seeding via seed.rb Factories = data generated via a factory method at runtime It's interesting that the ruby community has decided to overload the meaning of these terms to be very specific. I say this because in the "rest of the world" when dealing with testing, a test fixture is a much more generic concept. Typically it is the thing that sets up the test and tears down the test. Yes, often it creates data, but that is not necessarily it's job. Factories = This is a term that alludes to a well known and fundamental design pattern that can be used for a million different things and honestly has fallen out of vogue with java folks in favor of using dependency injection instead. It seems m...

As a person who has had the luxury to work in both ruby on rails and groovy grails, I've found a few differences that make their approach quite a bit different. #1 Groovy allows you to write java. While this isn't a huge deal, it can be both a positive and a negative. I've worked on teams where folks treat grails as a super simple java framework and never leverage any of groovy's dynamic goodness. While this isn't a huge problem, it does delay (or eliminate) to transition from J2EE xml configuration file hell into a more dynamic way of coding. #2 Ruby forces you to learn "the ruby way". For folks who are only used to java, seeing ruby code is like...seeing another language. Because of this, the idioms used in java are more quickly forgotten and you more quickly become a ruby native because you MUST. Only having worked with a few other people while they moved from java to ruby, I can only speak from my personal experience. I can say that ruby...

Modern web applications are all about user experience and a major factor in this is performance. A user interface that is laggy or gives the appearance of slowness will drive users away as quickly, if not more quickly, than an ugly and unintuitive one. This having been said, sometimes there are things that are just plain slow. Answering questions like "calculate the price for all 2 million products we sell in the north american market and present the top 10 with at least 50 in stock at a Distribution center within 50 miles" can often take some time. Couple these complex business rules with rich and powerful user interfaces and you have a potential for slowness to silently creep into your application. Digging through a few of the more modern javascript libraries, there are a number of strategies to combat this. We'll use the jquery datatable to illustrate some simple speedups that might apply. For our situation, let's pretend the above mentioned query takes 50...

I recently needed to stand up a DB2 server and was going to reach for my trusty rackspace account, but didn't feel like setting up DB2 for an experiment that would only last a few hours. Instead I turned to amazon. It turns out that amazon has preconfigured images for ubuntu/db2 that you can spin up almost instantaneously. In addition, their security model is a little more robust. Key things they do right from a security perspective (compared to rackspace). #1 They never send you a root password (via email or otherwise). You must generate a public/private key pair and download the key via https. Assuming you keep your secret key secure, there is minimal (if any) opportunity for someone to steal this key. Even if they hack your amazon account, I'm not sure they could get to your server immediately, even though they certainly could shut it down. #2 By default you are behind a firewall so that only a minimal set of tcp ports are even open. You need to actually take a...

I had an interesting discussion about locking in db2 a while back. It was interesting because it challenged some long held assumptions I had about db2 and how it handles locking. As usual, when I started digging deeper it turns out it is much more complicated that it would seem on the surface. First off, some background: I was having a conversation with a colleague about locking in various DBMS's and I made the statement that DB2 doesn't support MVCC. Thus, I contended, it is not possible for someone to read the previous version of a row that I have updated while I'm in a transaction that has altered it. At this point the fellow I was talking to looked at me as if I had just grown an arm out of my forehead. He stated (correctly, it turns out) that DB2 has supported this almost forever. I was, however, VERY confident that I was correct and subsequently dug up the documentation. Oddly enough, the documentation seemed to support the notion that I was mistaken (ga...

I've read with interest some documentation from Microsoft about how the HTTP 1.1 specification mandates some behavior. To Quote: WinInet limits connections to a single HTTP 1.0 server to four simultaneous connections. Connections to a single HTTP 1.1 server are limited to two simultaneous connections. The HTTP 1.1 specification (RFC2616) mandates the two-connection limit. This seems to be saying that browsers are only allowed (via some mythical mandate) to use two connections per server and any connections past two must block. After reading through the http 1.1 specification (again) I'm troubled that many folks have seriously misinterpreted this requirement. This is especially troubling because the manner in which RFCs are written is VERY explicit and it is (for me) really easy to understand the difference between a requirement and a recommendation. What is even more troubling is that people quote the microsoft reinterpretation of the specification as if it is a direct...