Ruby, Rails and some KDE stuff
April 23rd, 2005
Like many, I’ve been checking out the Ruby on Rails framework. Jonathan at work had reckoned that it was worth investigating to see how good it is for quickly deploying content managed web apps. For the last couple of weeks I have been developing a project management thing for us to use internally in Rails and I’m starting to get a feel for how things are pieced together. It’s really quite nice and getting something quick and simple up is Formula 1 fast. Once things become more complicated the development slows to a more sedate Subaru Impreza speed. Still quick. I know that it’s something that could be done in other languages, as some blog posts have pointed out, but that is missing the point – it hasn’t been done before, at least not as nicely as this. I’m certainly no expert on develpment frameworks, but the array of built in functions and facilities is impressive, and growing. This is the nicest thing about Rails – it allows you to get on with programming the site, rather than buggering about setting stuff up and performing database queries. And what a joy programming it is, largely thanks to Ruby.
Ruby is a pleasure to use and, in many ways, I’ve taken to it more than Rails. After a couple of WTF? hours at the start, things started to make sense. Then I got hold of The Pickaxe and things really started making sense. The more I poked and prodded Ruby, the more I liked it. Small and concise blocks of code started doing some pretty smart stuff. I ported a wee PHP-GTK program that I have written over to Ruby and it was around 30% smaller – not bad for programming a new language, day 1 (this is a testament to Ruby, not my talent). Ruby is a beautiful object-oriented language – it’s the best thing since sliced linux.
Recently at work I have had to develop some sites remotely, via FTP – a nasty practice that I don’t enjoy. It hasn’t been made easier by the fact that I’ve been unable to find any decent FTP program for KDE/linux (a minor untruth – Kasablanca is nearly OK). So I have decided to write my own, using Ruby and Korundum. I’ll write more about this little project later, but I will say that it’s a complete pleasure to write an application after writing websites. No browsers, no CS-fucking-S, ahh….
Another KDE thing that is on the horizon (but, for some reason, hasn’t had as much coverage as I would have expected) is the forthcoming Mozilla/Gecko Kpart. This should give the ability to swap between using KHTML and gecko for rendering at the touch of a button in Konqueror (or any other Kpart aware browsers) and should be a great feature for web developers, or anyone who likes one browser, but prefers the rendering in another etc… Very cool.
April 25th, 2005 at 04:53 PM
Have you had a play around with the ftp kio_slave in kde that lets you use ftp://user@a.b.c/path/to/file in any of the load/save dialogues, and which will let you transparently edit the files on the remote machines as if they where local?
If it is largely static based stuff, then I think that Quanta plus will actually give you a reasonably good wysiwyg (x)html editor that will handle remote ftp units transparently.
Alex
April 29th, 2005 at 11:17 AM
I had a little play but was unable to get it working for a recent project (I suspect it was thanks to some strangeness at the server as most FTP clients I used weren’t able to see the files!). I have had it working in the past though – ioslaves are very cool.
I’m writing my own wee thing for my own fun as much as anything else. I have no illusions of it becoming an awesome program – I just want something really simple that handles uploads and downloads the way I want.