Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

web framework deathmatch: Rails vs Seaside

Glenn wrote recently about how to decide between Rails or Seaside.
[…Rails] is better in some ways, but Seaside is better in other ways. I think it’s just that Rails’ strengths address problems that are particularly frustrating to developers right now.
Rails addressing the problem of updating a relational database from the web, while Seaside focuses on […]

DHH on Rails and Django

The creator of Rails talks about the recent Snakes and Rubies event in Chicago this last Saturday. The thing that really strikes me (besides the very cool presentation [PDF] David gave) is the Django vs Rails code:

class Project(meta.Model):
project_manager = meta.ForeignKey(ProjectManager)
milestones = meta.OneToOneField(Milestone)
categories = meta.ManyToManyField(Category)

p = […]

Ruby’s power + Java’s tools = Smalltalk today

Avi Bryant of Seaside fame asks:
What if there were a Hotspot VM that ran Ruby instead of Java, without any loss of performance, and a version of Eclipse written in and for this new platform?
If you are familiar with Avi, you can see where he is going with this. He goes through a brief […]

When do you NOT want to use a library for XmlHttpRequest?

Simple question - assuming we are talking about an app that is at least moderately sized (not a one-off or prototype), when would you not want to use a library or some sort of wrapper around the XmlHttpRequest object?
I had some discussions at work recently about this, where I was pushing for DWR [...]

Multiple feeds suck - switching to Feedburner and one feed

As has been written about many times before, having a bunch of different feeds with different names and formats is horrible from a usability standpoint and just dumb to begin with. Even I find it confusing when I try to add a blog to Bloglines and I'm confronted with five different options, and I'm [...]

Rubyconf 2005 for stragglers has moved

if you are looking for podcasts/video from RubyConf 2005...

moo.fx - lightweight javascript effects built on Prototype

ultratiny alternative to scriptaculous

Ajax ToDo list application #437

"Remember the milk" launched yesterday, bringing features galore and the kitchen sink

Deployment - is it really that hard?

(note: this is a post from my old blog reposted here)
I'm forever amazed at how difficult deployment seems to be at shops I've worked at. A previous employer handled deployment through a third party tool that failed routinely and required manual intervention almost daily. I remember having to login at 2 am after [...]