mike.mainguy

I thought I'd do a quick comparison of web frameworks to see how popularity is trending nowadays per google trends. I realized this is has some serious drawbacks, but as a person who has been in the j2ee space for years, I find the trend very interesting. The trend is clear, if you're an ace J2EE super guru, you are about in the same position as a yii developer. While you're experience might be transferrable, the days of java containers ruling the universe appear to be numbered. To do some other interesting comparisions, let's look at java specifically. This roughly supports my observation that Struts is dying off, spring is holding stead, and gwt...while making a big splash a few years ago seems to be tapering off. These numbers are a little deceptive because back in 2005 a lot of the "up and coming" frameworks, languages, and tools didn't even exist. So let's take a look at just the upstarts. I've included rails because it's...

We recently noticed some pretty interesting changes in ruby 1.9.2. It appears that require no longer allows relative paths and ruby is now more unicody. This means if you are in a directory with two files "foo.rb" and "bar.rb", you can no longer simply type "require 'foo'" inside bar.rb to use foo. Now, you need to either do "require './foo'" or "require_relative 'foo'". A potentially more difficult change is in how ruby handles character encodings. For the most part, this isn't a problem inside "normal" code and strings, but things get dicey if you start reading text files off a filesystem. This is especially dicey if you're doing this and you're on a mac AND you work with western european data AND it involves money. If you save a file with a currency symbol on a mac, then subsequently read the file on a machine (or a tool) that uses/assumes utf-8, you will not see €, you will see...

As a person who has one foot firmly in java and another in ruby, I'm often in a situation where I try to have an objective conversation about the advantages and disadvantages between the the two. Unfortunately, both of these camps are not very objective about themselves and each other. Ruby guys seem to think that ruby is all sunshine and lollipops and java is spawn of satan and visa versa. Find any java developer who knows nothing about ruby (or ruby on rails) and strike up a conversation about the advantages and disadvantages between the two. If they in any way care about programming, you will typically end up with a seriously heated discussion about: Performance, Scalability, Compiler Safety, Support, Maintainability, other stuff. On the other side of the equation, I'm a bit at a loss because I've never met a ruby developer who didn't previously work as a java (or C) developer. Typically a new convert from java/whatever has all the zeal of a new religious co...

I've been playing around with some rss feed parsing and decided to contrast the ruby way with the java way. First, the java way import com.sun.syndication.feed.synd.*; import com.sun.syndication.io.*; import java.net.URL; import java.util.List; public class RssJava { public static void main(String[] args) { long start = System.currentTimeMillis(); int total = 0; int entries = 0; try { SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput(); SyndFeed synFeed = input.build(new XmlReader(new URL("http://mikemainguy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"))); for (SyndEntry entry : (List ) synFeed.getEntries()) { entries++; List contents = entry.getContents(); for (SyndContent content : contents) { total += content.getValue().split(" ").length; } } } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); ...

Having worked extensively with both ruby and java, I thought I'd share some interesting differences between how one can approach solving problems in the two languages. Let's take a common example of a function that will take a variable number of arguments and return a string with all non-null values separated by commas. We'll start by just using the core runtime and see what we can do. Here's the Java example: public class StringJava { public static void main(String[] args){ System.out.println(printComma("test1","test2","Test3")); System.out.println(printComma("test1",null,"Test3","Test4")); } public static String printComma(String... names) { StringBuffer buff = new StringBuffer(); boolean first = true; for (String str: names) { if (str != null) { if (first) { buff.append(str); first = fal...

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...

The Backstory My wife is an avid garage sailer. She finds garage sales she thinks have promise, then cruises by them to see if there is anything of interest. She is so accomplished at this that she routinely turns a profit by snagging things that folks didn't realize had resale value, and flipping them at local consignment shops. While this doesn't pay the bills, it DOES provide enough extra cash to actually have her garage sailing at least pay for itself with a little left over. This is, however, not without it's share of problems: First, the postings online (or paper) for garage sales are scattered to the four winds. At this point, craigslist.org is the hands down winner for quality and quantity of posts. Local newspapers/classified also have a good quantity, but the few sites I found on google geared toward this are suffering terribly from a strategic chicken and egg problem. Second, while craigslist has a fairly high quality set of sales established, it h...