Archives for the month of: April, 2008

PaaS growing all the time

April 14, 08 //
2

Well these are certainly the days of Platform As A Service (PAAS), and imagine we are just really seeing the beginning of the compute cloud.  Though the definition of what is really a Platform is probably up for grabs, and Google are in the game now.   Though what is really exciting is the speed at with which we are seeing adoption and effect are now reflection of an Enterprise 2.0 world (maybe this is now Adoption 2.0 – a new world where we can see adoption of a technology realtime).  

The really exciting thing here is the number of players (Morph, Bungee, Heroku, RightScale) since the more the minds converge the more we see the benefits broaden.  At Exist we have been using Morph as a platform for our clients,  it allows us to immediately deploy client sites and then collaborate in a kinda UAT environment which is both easy and quick.  This kind of Infrastructure-on-demand is really a huge benefit – the virtual nature plays so easily in the hands of a collaboration based development company.

What is also important is it fits with out Web 2.0 tooling – as a company we actually choose the environment with the client (it can be anything from BaseCamp or JIRA and our dev teams are up on lots of tools).  The approach is always agile and that usually means a number of environments – Suddenly we are switching up from lots of servers to leveraging the cloud where it is a real blessing.  Real-time development without the hassle of deployment and administration,  giving our sys-admins the chance to work on strategic plans rather than operational needs.

With Morph getting ready to IPO in the Philippines it will be an exciting time to Rails developers looking to push products to market faster than ever.

Learning a little Ruby every day

April 9, 08 //
0

While I still have a lot going one I have been trying to get more time to pick up on Ruby and Rails. I have to admit coming from a long history of statically typed languages it has taken a bit of time, and losing the code completion of the Eclipse IDE that I have been using for Java development for so long took its toll. Still I have to admit I’m enjoying the language more every day.

Some of the nice components I’ve seen included the ability to sum calculated values from arrays where the method is accessing the ActiveRecord fields on the same object.


def sum_invoices
 invoices.to_a.sum(&:invoice_total)
end

Also I have been working with HAML after being introduced to it by one of the team and while it does take me back a little to all those Java templating languages and I now see how useful it is in pushing people toward using CSS.

Other nice little features I have been picking up on include using ruby in fixtures which includes being able to create large number amounts of test data.  As I get more into it the rewarding part the pace of my development appears to be picking up :)