Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

There is a tool written in Ruby called Cucumber. It parses English-like user story steps for testing. Stuff like:

User navigates to ‘/orders’
User presses ‘view orders’
User sees ‘You have 22 order’

It takes those sentences and runs them against code that actually performs the tests in the web browser. This means you can write English-like acceptance tests [...]

I don’t want to drive this topic into the ground because as I’ve said before, PHP and Ruby come from completely different directions, but here’s what I miss when I’m writing in PHP:
* Buggy static method inheritance – this is well noted in the PHP community
* Buggy class reflection – also well noted
* Symbols like [...]

.NET has the best documentation you are going to find in any platform. It's commercial and presumably a bunch of people were paid actual money to make sure the documentation was correct and complete. For the most part, I find that to be true. In some cases it can't compete with a community-driven doc site like PHP has. Then again, a lot of the user comments for PHP address shortcomings in PHP itself. You don't have that problem with .NET.

Ruby on Rails is a great web framework because it establishes smart conventions and application structure. To those of us who already were making well-structured web applications (particularly true in the Java community), it took us a while to see what the big deal is about Rails. After all, we were already using many of the practices Rails brought to the masses.

TDD says: Do the simplest thing next.
NDD says: Do the thing you need next the simplest way you can.

I’ve had a need lately to detect duplicate text files, or strings, using any means possible. It turns out that Ruby was the best answer. Here’s a review of what finally worked.

I run a lot of Ruby daemons and web servers for them. Managing all those init.d scripts was harder until I realized that I didn’t have to learn bash/sh to do it. I could write my init.d scripts in Ruby. Well that improved things, but now I’m caught once again in the middle of rolling [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been talking with more clients lately about Joomla. The Content Management System (CMS) is not dead, oh no, not dead at all. I’m not sure how PHP’s Joomla compares with a CMS like DotNetNuke, but my suspicion is that Joomla is far more widely used and probably has more modules and plugins too simply [...]