Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

I’m building PrestoScript in Ruby and the more I get into it, the less I am in anyone’s framework but my own. Why is that? Is there a certain class of problems that are frameworkless? I’ve been thinking lately that generalized frameworks could be a farce. I always explain to clients that Ruby on Rails [...]

ActiveRecord is one of the hidden treasures of the Rails framework from which Rails derives so much of its productivity. It features beautiful uses of the Ruby language, especially Ruby’s dynamic programming features.
ActiveRecord also makes it easy to be inefficient though. Efficient data access is not something that happens magically, and if ActiveRecord is left [...]

erlang is a programming language that is supposed to be very scalable. It encourages a form of design that is naturally scalable and as such requires some degree of adjustment for many programmers. The whole idea doesn’t sit well with me.

Functional programming languages have a templating feature, called a macro, that allows you to write code that writes code.
Writing code that writes code is an interesting idea, and is one of the cornerstones of Ruby on Rails. Rails promises to write code that works as long as you promise to use database and file [...]

Well, this looks pretty interesting. Google has released a scalable “app engine” where you upload your web site source code and it runs on their infrastructure.

Well, it looks like Akelos (http://www.akelos.org/) is taking the lead in the “Rails for PHP” race. It seems to have a better MVC architecture than cakePHP, especially where ActiveRecord is concerned.
MVC frameworks are an important design concept for modern Web 2.0 applications. I frequently consult on this topic and have a lot to say, too [...]

C# 3.0 has a few interesting language features that Ruby has been providing for a while now.
Most notable to me are lambdas and type inference. Lambdas have been covered already, but type inference is something new. It feels a bit like JavaScript because you just have to declare that a symbol is a variable. [...]

Understanding web services and related technologies will increase your decision-making power because there is an industry-wide push under way to get applications talking to one another in a standardized way. If you miss the point of this trend, you will find yourself wondering why the industry is making such erratic moves.

Today, Ben Allfree announced the release of the Nukelet 2.0 scripting platform for DotNetNuke, along with the much-anticipated ASP.NET scripting plugin.The Nukelet scripting platform now supports ASP.NET, PHP, Classic ASP, VBScript, and Ruby. Python, Java, and other languages are in development.The Nukelet scripting platform allows DotNetNuke developers and site administrators to quickly add custom programming [...]

The Prototype library for JavaScript enables rich client-side programming at a very detailed level. And with an extension library implementing the Observer pattern, event-based programming in JavaScript is about as good as it can be.