So, I'm not quite sure how I feel about Scoble writing a monthly column for Fast Company. I've been a subscriber since '96 and while the magazine has gone thru ups-and-downs, this seems a little surprising.
Obie shows a very cool way to handle ActiveRecord loading an Association Proxy. By overriding the loaded? method, you can include business logic to automatically return true that the proxy was loaded instead of hitting the database.
Obie uses the example of not creating the association proxy for a neighborhood when the population of the city is under 50,000.
Technorati Tags:
rubyonrails
I've had Dave Thomas' post about REST and the RADAR architecture open in one of my tabs since it was published a few weeks ago. I kept meaning to blog about it since it seemed very insightful with regards to the uses of REST as well as challenges ahead.
One issue that needs to be examined is that not all applications will follow a CRUD-style architecture so those will not map easily to some of the current Rails / REST services. I mention Rails only because the new REST routing and ActiveResource will enforce specific implementations which might or might not be the best choice for an application.
Dave talked a bit about RADAR (RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient) during some of the discussions last week at the Advanced Rails training. As an aside, if you ever get the chance to attend anything put on by the Pragmatic Studio, do so without hesitation. They really do an incredible job.
Ok, back to RADAR, the idea is simple, browsers are dumb and only understand two HTTP verbs (GET and POST). We can do things within URLs to help with the other verbs but really that's just big hack. Why not just have your REST server separate? Then have the View application interact with that behind the scenes. The browser will be talking with the View, not knowing any better.
By doing this, I believe you will see an increase of small, individual apps which just have one job. They could be things like authentication or preferences or maybe even logging. This will increase your network traffic but for some things that won't be a problem. The apps can be focused and reused by other View applications.
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rest, rubyonrails, RADAR
I'm sitting in my hotel room in Dallas, waiting to meet the other folks from work who are here for the Advanced Rails training put on by The Pragmatic Studio. Definitely should be a fun week!
I have a feeling this presentation by Blaine Cook will be the most attended session at the upcoming Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.
More thoughts on the whole Twitter / Rails thing:
There are some more but I'm saving those for a longer post.
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rubyonrails, scability, twitter
I needed to compile FreeImage over the weekend and was having all sorts of issues with the Makefile specifying the Intel architecture instead of figuring out whether the compilation was being done on PowerPC or Intel.
Thankfully, I found this forum entry which helped get things built and installed. It's definitely a hack but it got the job done.
A little tempest in a teapot the past day or so has been the interview Twitter developer, Alex Payne did. In it, he somewhat calls out Rails for some of the performance issues Twitter has had. Of course, this causes some to jump on the Rails can't scale bandwagon but I think that really misses the point.
It seems Twitter is doing upwards of 11K hits per second. That is a very impressive number for any site to handle especially when they didn't build the site to scale from Day 1 which I think it the right thing to do.
DHH has chimed in with his thoughts and tried to clarify a couple of points. In doing so, I think the original post came off a bit defensive but if you read thru the comments you'll see a good back and forth between Alex and DHH. Those should be raised to the level of a post. In his comment, Alex ends with: We're happiest scaling on Rails. I think that should be what the focus is, not on the Twitter folks slamming Rails and wishing they had used something else.
More thoughts from Rafe and Kellan. Kellan ends with:
You’ll never build a successful site if you build to scale from day 1, scaling is always a catch up game, but it’s the best game there is.
Another mantra to live by because if you have scaling issues, you are generally doing something right.
Technorati Tags:
rubyonrails, scability, twitter
Today, EarthLink announced Arlington, VA as the next city we'll be setting up a Wi-Fi network for. I didn't find out via the usual all-staff email, instead, I found out via Twitter, ELNK.
This is a pretty awesome thing and I can only hope the folks in corporate communications will use it effectively to help spread the word about the things we are doing.
Dave's also blogged about it on Earthling.
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earthlink, twitter
Steve Ivy gives his thoughts about the difference between open source and open services. In other words, either being able to access the code behind an app or just being able to access data whether yours or the community's. This is a great post because it is increasingly becoming an issue.
Dare Obasanjo talked a bit about this in his post stating that Open Source is dead. It was killed by social software.
In addition, the fact that we are increasingly moving to a Web-based world means that Open Source will be less and less effective as a mechanism for preventing vendor-lockin in the software industry. This is why Open Source is dead, as it will cease to be relevant in a world where most consumers of software actually use services as opposed to installing and maintaining software that is "distributed" to them.
I don't know Peter Kim personally but I'm very sad he decided to cancel his EarthLink account. He was a customer for over twelve years, starting with Mindspring before it merged into EarthLink.
The reason he gave though is haunting me. Here's two little snippets:
The main reason I finally closed it? Because after 12 years of being a monthly recurring payment for the company, I felt zero affinity for the Earthlink brand. Their communication to me was never more than a monthly email invoice and as a customer, I didn't feel Comcastic or that I got more or that anything was really being delivered. Present value aside, I've spent over $3,000 in payments for dial-up. Maybe Earthlink didn't want to bring this to my attention, as if the reason I was still subscribed was because I had forgotten about it.
and
So farewell, Earthlink/Mindspring. Your biggest fault was a bland brand that used to be something special.
I wish I had something to argue with him about but I don't and to me, that's really tough.
Over the weekend, Topix reinvented itself. The initial verdict from me is very positive, the home page is nice and clean, inviting you to input your zip code and get your local news. What's really interesting to me though is the process by which Topix rebuilt itself.
Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, blogged about it Sunday. Without hesitation, I would love to work for/with someone like him. The fact he is transparent about it is just awesome to me. The content of the post though is even better. Looking at the strengths of your current product and building around them is smart and the right way to go. Doing so in six months is amazing especially when you already have a 'successful' product.
I'm sure there were plenty of folks who didn't want to make any changes. I can hear their voices now, why mess with something that works? If you do this, you'll turn off the existing users. We don't have enough resources to make these changes. You can go on and on with excuses until you eventually either succumb to them or move beyond them and actually get things moving.
It is the ability to keep going in the face of your current situation, either positive or negative, that separates people and companies from one another. If you can't keep moving forward (I couldn't resist), then you will be passed by and become increasingly irrelevant and to me, that is a fate much worse than failure.
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rich+skrenta, topix, keep+moving+forward
Last night, I took the kids to see Meet the Robinson's. I normally don't find inspiration in the movies I see with the kids but this one was a bit different. The story itself is your normal hero's journey and ends predictably well.
The part I really liked though was the theme of Keep Moving Forward. It was the mantra of the Robinson family. Don't dwell in the past but move ahead with your ideas. Know that you will make mistakes but learn from them, don't become bogged down with them. In other words, keep moving forward.
The movie ended with a quote from Walt Disney:
“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long.
We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
I'm making this my new focus, both personally and professionally, the past is the past but you have to keep moving forward. We'll see how it goes.