James Crisp

Software dev, tech, mind hacks and the occasional personal bit

Category: Technical Page 12 of 15

BarCamp Sydney this Saturday

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On August 22, 2007

In C#, JRuby, Personal, Ruby / Rails, Talks, Technical

It is BarCamp in Sydney this Saturday. I haven’t been to one of these unconference style events before, but I’ve heard good things about it from my colleagues. I’m quite excited to go along and see what it is like.

If you’re in Sydney and interested in stopping by, details are as follows:

When: Sat 25th August 2007 from about 9am
Where: University of Technology, Sydney (Jones St entrance)
More details…

One of the novel aspects of BarCamp is that all participants are encouraged to present or start a discussion around something that interests them. For my part, depending on what people are interested in, I was thinking of one of the following:

  • new stuff in the .net space (C# 3.0, .NET 3.5, LINQ, WPF, WCF, etc) and showing some demos
  • giving a bit of a Ruby/JRuby introduction with help from Ola’s JavaBin slides
  • or, if people are keen, a discussion around JRuby vs C# 3 vs Java vs ?? and their stacks for different situations and problems

      • By the way, the conference is free, and it is not too late to sign up 🙂
      Hope to see you there!

Slides from ‘Learning to live with the static-typing fascist and the dynamic-typing fan-boy in your enterprise…’

By

On August 15, 2007

In C#, Ruby / Rails, Talks, Technical

Here’s the slides from Jim‘s and my recent presentation at Tech Ed 07 on the Gold Coast and in Auckland:

LearningToLiveWithTheStaticTypingFascistAndTheDynamicTypingFanboy-TechEd07.pptx (Powerpoint 2007)

LearningToLiveWithTheStaticTypingFascistAndTheDynamicTypingFanboy-TechEd07.ppt (Powerpoint 2003)

You may also be interested in having a read of the abstract.

TechEd 07 – Some interesting snippets

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On August 14, 2007

In C#, Ruby / Rails, Technical

Silverlight

  • Silverlight runs on MAC and PC.
  • There is now a CLR for the Mac.
  • Microsoft is not currently planning to provide Silverlight for any unix platform (although there is MoonLight).
  • Silverlight 1.0 is basically a media player. It has hooks for javascript etc and some might say it has similar functionality to the Flash movie player.
  • Silverlight 1.1 has the real programming API. All further Silverlight references are to 1.1.
  • Silverlight will do a (currently undefined) simplified subset of WPF.
  • Silverlight gives acess to DOM in the browser.
  • Currently, the alpha allows 1mb local storage per page. In future, the storage is probably going to be shared across a domain rather than on a page by page basis.
  • Silverlight provides the capability to open a file on disk for read to allow for file uploads etc.
  • Interop between JavaScript and hosted Silverlight app is quite easy.
  • Silverlight looks a bit fiddly to set up, requiring javascript and sometimes xaml bootstrap – but being improved.

Software Factories

  • Allow solution and project structures to be auto-generated based on wizards.
  • Can provide code snippets and some (often template-based) code auto-generation.
  • Comes with documentation in help files and some context specific stuff.
  • Can include GUI designers that generate code.
  • People can develop their own domain specific factories.

DSLs
Currently, Microsoft’s take on DSLs is GUI editors, not written language or code. At the Software Factories talk, a GUI tool in Visual Studio for drawing your business entities and relationships was billed as a DSL.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

  • Activity based with GUI designer for connecting and composing activities.
  • Custom activities and compositions can be developed and inherit from base classes.
  • Single threaded and mainly queue based, with some events sprinkled through.
  • Activities can reference data from other activities using a mechanism vaguely like data binding.
  • Hosted in the CLR, so can be part of a console app, ASP.NET, WinForms etc.
  • Handles pickling and reconstitution of long running activities.
  • Base Activity classes provide virtual hooks. Eg, ‘Execute’ for doing the work, ‘Cancel’, and ‘Compensate’ for handling rollback scenarios.

New in the Enterprise Library 3.1

  • Validation Application Block: provides simple, attribute based property validation. Easy integration with standard ErrorProvider on WinForms and WebForms and WPF is possible. Looks ok but somewhat basic – don’t think it supports warnings for example. It has GUI tool support and also capability to specify related objects which need to be validated.
  • Policy Injection Application Block: provides aspect oriented programming (AOP) style coding using attributes. All new AOP objects need to be created using the block’s object factory. Looks useful – there is out of the box support for validation, caching and logging in AOP fashion.

 

Tech Ed Talks

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On August 2, 2007

In C#, Personal, Ruby / Rails, Talks, Technical

Jim Webber and I will be co-presenting at Tech Ed Australia and Tech Ed New Zealand this year. Here’s the low down:

Learning to live with the static-typing fascist and the dynamic-typing fan-boy in your enterprise…

Gold Coast
Thursday 9 Aug
5pm – 6:15pm

Auckland
Tuesday 14 Aug
2:20pm – 3:35pm

“What’s best for your enterprise? Is it the ‘glue that never sets’ and flexibility of dynamic languages like Ruby, or the tried and true, hard and fast rules and tool support of static languages like C# 3.0? Are there different trade-offs for green field development and integration?

And more importantly, which is best, the Mac or PC?

In a dynamic, and combative presentation, Jim and James will let their alter-egos run amok and answer these questions from the perspective of a seasoned enterprise architect and a l33t hax0r. By the end of this session you will understand the interplays between the two personality types, have had a few laughs, and picked up a few tips on how to use both technology
sets in harmony in your enterprise. “

Hope to see you there!

Ultimate Laptop Protection

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On July 24, 2007

In Personal, Technical




Better than money can buy. Made by my dad 🙂

Consulting

By

On July 15, 2007

In Personal, Technical


A present from my adorable fiancée 🙂

Adding a New Rails Project under Subversion

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On July 1, 2007

In Ruby / Rails, Technical

I generally use Subversion for source control when given the choice. In day to day usage, I like to use Tortoise SVN as it gives you a GUI with tick boxes for files to check in. However, it’s handy to use the command line tool for project setup and automation.

Often, there is a subversion repository already set up and running on another machine. In this situation, I generally:

  1. Check out the repository at the top level into a temporary directory through Tortoise, add a new directory ([appname]) for the new project, and check it in.
  2. Generate the new rails app (rails [appname]).
  3. Check out [appname] from the repository into the local directory [appname] which contains the Rails project.
  4. Add and check in all files through Tortoise.
  5. Run the following commands from the command line to remove logs and tmp from the repository:
svn remove log/*

svn commit -m "removing all log files from subversion"

svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/svn update log/

svn commit -m "Ignoring all files in /log/ ending in .log"

svn remove tmp/*

svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp/

svn update tmp/svn 

svn commit -m "Ignoring all files in /tmp/"

There’s more Rails/Subversion info to be found on the Rails wiki.

The Castle Project – Rails for .NET

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On June 12, 2007

In C#, Ruby / Rails, Technical

The Castle Project is an interesting open source alternative to ASP.NET / ADO.NET. Among other things, the Castle Project provides a Rails-like development framework for .NET. It has an ActiveRecord implementation built on top of NHibernate, a very Rails-like MVC setup called MonoRail, and uses NVelocity for template style views. It’s worth checking out. This screencast gives a bit of an overview.

There’s tough competition around the corner though, with Orcas already in beta, providing XAML, LINQ and O-R mapping.

Is .NET or Java dying?

By

On June 5, 2007

In C#, Java, Ruby / Rails, Technical

Are C# and .NET losing ground as Martin Fowler suggests? Or is Java’s market share dropping? What about Ruby? And what about the Australian market in particular?

Here’s what I’ve been able to find.

Job Trends
Which technologies have the most demand for people?

From Indeed.com, which claims to search “millions of jobs from thousands of job sites”, but I suspect may have a USA focus:

“Best Talent Index May 2007” from Best People Solutions gives an Australian perspective:

Here’s job counts from the (largest?) primarily Australian job search site Seek on 5 June 2007, 3pm (today):

Keyword(s) Number of positions found
Java 3,414
“.NET” or “dot net” 2,744
“c#” or “c sharp” 1,722
ruby 100

As an aside, I remember doing a search on Seek for “ruby” about 6 months ago, and getting under 20 jobs mentioning it.

Search Engine Number of Hits

Extract from the TIOBE Programming Community Index for June 2007:

Position
Jun 2007		 Position
Jun 2006		 Delta in Position Programming Language Ratings
Jun 2007		 Delta
Jun 2006		 Status
1 1 Java 20.025% -1.10% A
2 2 C 15.967% -2.29% A
3 3 C++ 11.118% +0.45% A
4 4 (Visual) Basic 9.332% -0.85% A
5 5 PHP 8.871% -0.72% A
6 6 Perl 6.177% +0.17% A
7 8 C# 3.483% +0.25% A
8 7 Python 3.161% -0.30% A
9 10 JavaScript 2.616% +1.16% A
10 19 Ruby 2.132% +1.65% A


I think this gives a good idea of web buzz, but suggest that most non-IT companies do not publish information about their projects and chosen technologies and languages on the web.

Conclusion
The data collected suggests that:

  • Both .NET and Java are major players in the job market with thousands of positions advertised, implying wide industry adoption of both.
  • Neither .NET nor Java seem to be undergoing any significant decline in jobs.
  • Java has much more information about it on the internet, although .NET is slowing gaining ground and Java slowly losing it.
  • Ruby is comparatively tiny but growing rapidly in terms of jobs and information on the internet.

Thanks
Thanks to Jason Yip and Suzi Edwards for their help finding/sourcing information.

Can you spot the bug?

By

On May 20, 2007

In Ruby / Rails, Technical

In a model class which has ‘quantity’, ‘quantity_already_taken’ and ‘quantity_requested’ properties, I add the following:

def before_save
  quantity = 1 if quantity == 0
  if quantity + quantity_already_taken > quantity_requested
  ......

Tests blow up everywhere with:

TypeError: nil can't be coerced into Fixnum   (on the line with the addition)

Why?

After a little more debugging, it is clear that ‘quantity’ is nil. How could that happen?

The answer lies in the fact that Ruby requires an explicit self reference when using attribute writers (aka, property setters) within the class itself. This feels clunky to me, but for your information, here’s a rationalisation of the explicit self requirement.

So, in case you’re wondering, what happened above is that the ‘if’ line created a nil local variable called ‘quantity’! This local variable then had higher scope precedence than the class attribute with the same name. The addition line was then using the local ‘quantity’ rather than the class attribute and hence failed with the nil error.

All fixed by explicity referencing self:

def before_save
  self.quantity = 1 if (quantity == 0)
  if quantity + quantity_already_taken > quantity_requested
  ......

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