Ruby on Rails

The iPhone… Its not even out yet and everyone is drooling over it

And if they aren’t, they should be!  Ajax has long been the missing link between phones as a mobile computing platform and phones as a simple messaging device.  the fact is that there is a vastly larger poll of people willing to write useful web apps than useful java apps.  I would also argue that it’s easier to write good web apps than java apps of the same magnitude.  So with apples announcement that the iPhone will support web 2.0 standards (read AJAX) what was once a tasty looking new toy has become something more. It’s become a tasty toy with a good enough reason for the cost.   I’d have to pay to break my contract with Sprint, start a contract with Cingular, buy the new iPhone, buy the wife a new phone (shared Sprint plan)…. I’m probably looking at $700-$1000 to make the switch.  And I’m already thinking that its worth it.  I’m going to hold off though… as long as I can stand it.  I want someone to review it, I want to see how the web explosion hits Cingulars networks… I want to see how hard they are to find at first…  Mostly I just want the damn phone really bad… But I’m gonna try to be a good boy and hold off… Maybe

Openfound (cont)

If there’s one thing that the OpenFount guys have shown me is that they’re serious about the Infinidisk product.  Mr. Donahue gave me a quick call this evening (seems my e-mail server and his e-mail server aren’t talking properly, so while I get his communications) he has not received mine (probably explaining the lack of response to my pre-sales inquiry)) to chat about his product. The particular bug that I noticed, he mentioned, was fixed a while ago in a later release than I’d tried.  In my defense the page looks precisely like it did when I first got the product, and the release tar file has no version numbers on it… yet… so I did check for updates.  I found out some good info, though.  They’re working on  putting up a trac page for some real bidirectional community participation soon.  They’ll also be putting version numbers in their archives soon. Both of those things will help, I think, improve their visibility to people like me (who have very very little time.)
I’ll be re-testing the infinidisk product again, later, when next I customize an AMI.

The (theoretical) web services database

I’ve been kind of floating around this topic for a while… Well databases in general… And I see a lot of people who have rather high standards (which is not a bad thing.)  I imagine the complication of offering a service like this comes from the fact that database people have very stringent standards.

Things like ACID transactions, Foreign keys, Table/Row/Column/Field read/write locking, always come up in these types of conversations.  I suppose that this is so because it’s been the standard for so long… It’s just how people *think* about databases… Which means that its what databases should be, right? Right?

Well not long ago the people at Amazon rethought process communication, and rethought storage, and then rethought servers.  Perhaps its about time they rethought the database as well.  I have a hunch (as others have noted here before) that they already are!

I really think that a lot, and I mean a LOT, could be done with a very simple model.

  1. Tables are their own island (no foreign keys)
  2. simple auto Incrementing PK’s
  3. every column indexed
  4. only simple operators supported ( =, >, < , !=, is null, is not null )

Heresy! Ack! Foo! Bar! NO! THATS NOT A REAL DATABASE.  Well, no, not as you mean by “real database” but it certainly is a database.  And I expect it would be good enough for 85% of peoples wants, needs, and desires.

We’ve learned that delays in storage give us permanence.  We’ve learned that the pipeline is a good (and global) thing, and we’ve learned that impermanence gives us expandability.  Necessity being the mother of invention I expect that something like this will be out soon, and I expect that people will learn to be perfectly happy with it.  It’s all about flexibility and agility here people!
It’ll come, people will complain, it’ll work, and as time goes on, I think it’ll get better and better.

SVN + RoR = Passive Version Controlled Goodness!

While working with both rails and subversion (which I like using to keep my projects under version control) I was irritated by having to go through and add or delete a bunch of files when using the code generation tools. Especially when first putting the project together, there always seemed to be 6 new files to manually add before every commit… So I wrote a script to handle the adding of new, and removing of missing files for a commit.

#!/bin/bash
IGNORE_DIRS="^\?[ ]{6}log$|^\?[ ]{6}logs$|^\?[ ]{6}tmp$"
IFS="
"
for i in $(svn st | grep -Ev $IGNORE_DIRS | grep -E "^\?")
  do
    i=$(echo $i | cut -d' ' -f7-1000)
    svn add $i
done
for i in $(svn st | grep -E "^!")
  do
    i=$(echo $i | cut -d' ' -f7-1000)
    svn del $i
done

Now I just ./rail_svn.sh and then svn ci and everything is always version controlled. Very nice. The only thing you have to watch out for is leaving files laying around (I’ve had a couple commits which, along with code, also involved removing a vim .swp file or two)

I would be willing to bet that this script would be a decent foundation for a passively version-controlled-directory system if anyone were to want to do something like that with svn (think mail stores, or home directories or anything in which files or directories are added or removed often). This is mainly needed because svn was designed to be an active version control system