How Microsoft is changing the programming world

Several years ago I knew a programmer, we’ll call him Joe, who fancied himself to be a great developer. He was a senior developer at “Big Co.”, who received a large enough pay check to just as easily compensate a few junior developers. The guy had Microsoft certifications, as expected of one in his position, and he appeared to know Visual Studio inside and out, just as you’d imagine. What...

Padrino: a Ruby framework built upon Sinatra

From the Padrino’s site: Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the excellent Sinatra Microframework. Sinatra is a DSL for creating simple web applications in Ruby with speed and minimal effort. This framework makes it as fun and easy as possible to code increasingly advanced web applications by expanding upon Sinatra while maintaining the spirit that made it great. The Ruby community has plenty of web...

Benchmarking MacRuby 0.6

Recently MacRuby 0.6 was released. The development team put a lot of emphasis on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9, and the viability of MacRuby as a tool for developing Mac OS X applications. Focus on these aspects took precedence over performance, but I was still curious to see how well it performed when compared to Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9, respectively. This article showcases the results of a small Ruby...

DB2 support for Django 1.2 is here

The latest release of the IBM Adapter for Django now supports Django 1.2. Aside from enabling you to use the most recent version of Django, this release adds a few new goodies into the mix, that I’m sure many will appreciate. For example, IBM’s adapter (through the underlying DBI wrapper) now uses persistent connections, which are especially helpful when dealing with Django – as it lacks connection...

Free Python screencast about solving mazes

ThinkCode.TV’s English site is going to be launched on April 19th. To celebrate the upcoming launch and whet your appetite, a 19 minute long screencast about solving ASCII mazes with a few lines of Python code was just released for free. This video serves to illustrate Python’s elegance and power, as well as ThinkCode.TV’s approach to screencasts and education. In order to download the screencast,...

Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition, nginx and Passenger (aka mod_rails) on Ubuntu

The following is a very short guide on setting up Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE), nginx and Passenger, for serving Ruby on Rails applications on Ubuntu. It also includes a few quick and easy optimization tips. We start with setting up REE (x64), using the .deb file provided by Phusion: wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/66163/ruby-enterprise_1.8.7-2009.10_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i...

Getting MacRuby’s compiler to work

There is major news in Rubyland today. MacRuby’s team just released their fist beta of version 0.5 (an experimental, still incomplete version of Ruby), which brings JIT, removal of the dreaded GIL (Global Interpreter Lock), native threads, GCD (Grand Central Dispatch) for multicore computing, and a whole new set of features found in the release announcement to the table. The most important new feature is the...

Benchmarking Tornado vs. Twisted Web vs. Tornado on Twisted

FriendFeed, which was recently acquired by Facebook, just released an interesting piece of open source software. Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google’s webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying...

Improve the speed and security of your SQL queries

An easy way to improve the performance and security of SQL queries is to replace literals with parameters. By replacing literal values with parameters, advanced relational databases will be able to compile your queries and have their execution plans cached. This saves time and precious resources when the same query (minus the actual values) is executed over and over. Consider the following series of...

Enabling support for DB2 and Python/Django/SQLAlchemy on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! This is the Python version of a post I made about Ruby a few days ago. Now that Mac OS X 10.6 is out, it’s time to leave the world of 32 bit computing behind. The pre-installed Python interpreter will run in 64 bit mode by default, so you may need to pay attention...

Installing the Ruby driver for DB2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Now that Mac OS X 10.6 is out, it’s time to leave the world of 32 bit computing behind. The pre-installed Ruby interpreter will run in 64 bit mode by default, so you may need to pay attention when installing some C-based gems. The ibm_db Ruby gem for DB2 can easily be installed or updated to the latest available version by following these simple steps: $ sudo -s $ export...

Startup for sale on eBay (and it’s a great deal)

One of the best programmers I know is selling a web application on eBay, that he’s been developing and running for the past three years. Given the starting price and considering what one lucky person or company will walk away with, I must say, it’s an amazing deal. I’m writing about his auction here so that I can help it get the proper exposure it deserves and because I think it’s an...

Recommended Ruby and Rails books (August 2009)

I finally got around to updating the Ruby and Rails book pages. The existing list was getting a bit obsolete and I didn’t like the idea of recommending old books to newcomers. I also had some interesting new entries. Without further ado: Recommended Ruby Books Recommended Rails Books A few people may disagree with the choices, but I think most experienced Ruby and Rails programmers, who’ve read those...

How much faster is Ruby on Linux?

In a previous article I compared the performance of Ruby on Windows, built through Microsoft Visual C++ and GCC. The numbers for the MinGW version were very impressive. So the question now becomes, how does its performance compare to that of Ruby on Linux? To quote one person (Alex) who commented on the aforementioned post: With the new mingw32 substantial speed improvements, think it makes sense now to also test...

On Scala’s future

Kenneth McDonald posted the following question about Scala’s future in the Scala mailing list: I thought it would be interesting to find out people’s predictions for how much of the Java market Scala will eventually penetrate. It’s nice to see Scala doing reasonably well so far, so now’s your chance to make a prediction on the future of Scala: a) Scala will remain a niche language, competing...

The DB2 adapter now supports Django 1.1

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! I’m glad to announce that the API team has just released version 1.0.2 of the adapter for Django. And on my birthday to boot, what a nice present. This version extends its support to the recently released Django 1.1, as well as incorporating the feedback that was...

A faster Ruby on Windows is possible (benchmarks for 4 implementations inside)

In yesterday’s post I compared IronRuby 0.9, Ruby 1.8.6 (from the One-Click Installer) and Ruby 1.9.1 (downloaded from the official site) against one another. IronRuby did great, but the discussion in the comment section quickly veered towards what version of the One-Click Ruby Installer should have been used. I justified my choice of using the “old” One-Click Installer, by the fact that I...

Comparing the performance of IronRuby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 on Windows

In my latest article I discussed the importance of JRuby as a means of introducing Ruby to the Enterprise world. Most of the companies that belong to this ecosystem are Java based, but we cannot forget that a sizable portion of them are Microsoft-centric. Within these companies, Ruby will be far more welcome if a .NET implementation is available. The answer to this need is sufficiently fulfilled by IronRuby (version...

On JRuby’s importance for the future of Ruby

In a recent blog entry, Charles Nutter argues about the importance of JRuby for Ruby’s adoption within the Enterprise. Or, in his own words: The idea of “Enterprise Ruby” has become less repellant since Dave Thomas’s infamous keynote at RailsConf 2006. There are a lot of large, lumbering organizations out there that have yet to adopt any of the newer agile language/framework combinations, and...

Why technical marketing is important for programmers

Most programmers I know hate marketing. Their dislike stems from two root causes: the fact that they aren’t naturally good at it, and their misconception of what technical marketing actually is. “Naturally” is the keyword here, given that technical marketing takes a certain sort of conscious effort and is a skill (a social one) that can be learned, just like programming. I fully understand that...