Hot off the press

Our very own Tom Beddard wrote a letter to NMA ages ago (in response to an article back in July about Ruby and Rails) - so long ago in fact that we'd given up hope of seeing it in print. And yet, yesterday, there it was in all its full colour glory. We thought we'd share our pride (and his opinions) with you.

I'd like to echo David Heinemeier Hansson's words that Ruby on Rails is great for developing more than just community sites (NMA 10.07.08). At tictoc we've used it to develop more than 200 websites, including ecommerce, and it has won us over. We now use it exclusively and are convinced it has advantages over .Net and Java. We've never experienced problems with scaling and the open-source background has been a benefit, not a problem. We find that Ruby (and Rails) allows us to be the organisation we want to be - a real mix of creative and technical - and to produce sites that don't compromise on design or functionality.

As the biggest Rails agency in Scotland, we're keen to foster the community. So if any fellow Rails enthusiasts want to drop in for a chat, please do, or find us at the next ScotRUG meet. We want Rails to take off and would urge more clients to consider it, and more developers to experience the flexibility it offers. For now, it's a chance for specialists to get ahead of the big boys.                            Author: Tom Beddard, technical director, tictoc Family  Published: 11.09.08

By Kate Wooding
Published: 12 September 2008
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Scotland on Rails

tictoc will be presenting at Scotland's first Ruby on Rails conference taking place on 4-5 April in Edinburgh.

I'll be presenting a talk called 'Deploying Rails with Litespeed: a developers best kept secret!'. Deploying Rails applications is still a sore point for developers, especially when you start hosting multiple sites. I'll be spreading the good word about Litespeed and how it has made our lives easier at tictoc.

There's a decent line up of speakers with some big names from the Rails community, full details over at Scotland on Rails.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 February 2008
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RailsConf: Day 2

Day two of the European Rails Conference kicked-off with the main man himself, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). The creator of Rails talked on how the framework and community has changed over the last three years from the position of the young upstart, who was at first laughed at and ignored but is now taken seriously as a real alternative for big business.

This reiterated a theme for the whole conference about how Rails is now being considered and used in more and more Global 1000 companies. I was talking to a guy from IBM who was saying how he has been successful in pushing the Rails platform for internal projects within the company. Both IBM and Sun were main sponsors of the conference, which tells us how these big companies are sitting up and paying attention.

DHH then proceeded to demonstrate some of the new features and refinements in the soon to be released version 2.0 of Rails. A nice overview of this can be found over here.

Making Rails More Artificially Intelligent

The first session of the day started with an interesting talk from the guys at http://bee.com.es on how to use algorithms to solve 'intelligent' problems and make your applications smarter. The talk focussed on two key areas bayesian networks and genetic algorithms. It's a fascinating field and is growing ever more important as it provides methods that help make sense of the ever increasing volume of information on the web, such as improving search results, filtering spam and creating personalised suggestions (such as products or music of interest).

Full Text Search with Ferret

Programmers seem to love giving their creations odd and sometimes silly names, such as Ferret. Ferret is actually the search engine we use to provide the onsite search capability of our websites, so there could be a vaguely tangible link with searching and 'ferreting' through a site... Anyway, this talk was on some of the more unknown/advanced features of the search engine. There were some useful tips that will be working their way into our implementation soon.

Rubinius - Improving the Ruby Ecosystem

Rubinius is a brand new code-base for the Ruby language. Most of the core functionality is actually written in Ruby, so it will be possible to easily go in and directly modify the core functionality. New features like modern memory management and garbage collection mechanisms should provide significant performance improvements. Applications can also be compiled into packages in a similar way to Java to enable easier distribution and productisation.

One concern is that the Ruby platform will become splintered with two different versions of Ruby, however the Rubinius project assures us it will keep full compatibility with the original Ruby. An interesting note is that Rubinius has a complete RSpec test suite based upon the original Ruby functionality. The same test suite is also used by JRuby thus following the same standard specification.

Scaling a Rails Application

The final session of the day was by one of the developers behind the hugely popular Twitter. Whilst not something directly affecting us at the moment, it was interesting to gain some insight into their system. Unfortunately the presentation wasn't as prepared as it should had been and contained a few mistakes.

One interesting point was the announcement that Twitter will be open-sourcing a daemon component called Starling that they use to offload long-running processes to maintain browser responsiveness for the client.

Keynote Speeches

There were two keynote speeches worth mentioning, the first by Dr Roy Fielding called “The Rest of REST” which dealt with using REST as an architecture of developing modern web applications. Roy was one of the original authors of the HTTP protocal - something the entire internet is now reliant upon. Although rather academically orientated it was interesting to hear some of the history behind such a core component of the internet.

The last keynote was a talk by Craig McClanahan from Sun. Craig is the creator of the original mega Java framework, Struts. Being a popular speaker within Java circles he gave a very energetic talk on how he has enjoyed the power and productivity gains from using Rails, even so far as admitting that it feels painful having to go back into Java - quite an admission from a hard-core Java guru! 

Photo credits Duncan Davidson and Patrick Lenz.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 September 2007
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RailsConf: Day 1

This year the European Rails Conference was held in Berlin with over 500 like-minded developers from around the world gathered to discuss, network and learn about the Ruby on Rails framework and Ruby in general.

Having been to a few physics conferences in the past I'm used to being among groups of techies who feel more comfortable communicating with computers than those around them, so I was quite surprised that there was a real buzz and enthusiasm at the conference. Maybe it was because few people were older than their mid-thirties and the vast majority were Apple Mac users. Everyone seemed to be excited about being able to use technologies that enabled them to do cool stuff on the web.

Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec 

The three day event started with two half-day tutorial sessions. The first was about the relatively new Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) technique that aims to provide a more meaningful testing framework for your application whilst also defining a natural language specification of what it should do and how it should behave; the business and technology sides of a project should refer to the same system in the same way. I'll be posting another article about this and the RSpec framework in more detail shortly.

Adobe Flex and Rails 

The second tutorial session was an introduction on how to use the Adobe Flex platform with Rails applications to create a rich dynamic user experience in Flash. Adobe is really pushing the Flex platform as option for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) despite the increasing sophistication of Web 2.0 Javascript libraries such as Prototype/Scriptaculous and jQuery/UI. An interesting shortfall was that the speaker couldn't really give definitive examples of 'killer' flex applications out there already, which confirms the feelings of many that Flex is still a niche technology.

Keynote: The Art in Rails

The first day ended with an inspiring keynote by Dave Thomas, one of the key figures within the Ruby and Rails community. His talk "The Art in Rails" was based on the analogy that software engineering is like art in that a programmer can suffer the same problems as an artist, such as writers block, knowing when to stop and satisfying the customer.

His solution to the first problem is to use exploratory testing to rapidly prototype ideas in order to work around conceptual blocks - even work through the problem the old-school way using bits of paper and a pen.

The second problem of knowing when to stop can be controlled by breaking the development process up into fixed chunks of time and functionality, which are refined through iterations. The result of each iteration should be an application that can work with the functionality defined so far, which is a core concept of Agile Development.

His final point on knowing how to satisfy the customer was illustrated with a selection of famous portraits. A great artist will look beyond the surface of their subject, which might not directly reflect reality but does capture the meaning and personality of the person within. In software terms this means getting into the nitty-gritty details with the client by asking why again and again. Often a client's initial project request is quite different to what they actually want and need.

Dave wrapped up by saying that there is art in engineering and there is engineering in art; Ruby is the canvas and Rails the paint. He ended by suggesting to everyone to
Treat your next project as if it were a work of art”

- quite a challenge!

Photo credits: Duncan Davidson and Zeno Crivelli

By Tom Beddard
Published: 19 September 2007
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