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ActiveRecord: the Visual Basic of Object Relational Mappers

I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails intensively for several months, and I’ve finally found a place where Rails can’t readily be extended to do what I want. It’s ActiveRecord, which is probably the most controversial part of Rails.
I’m reminded of a James Gosling quote disparaging Microsoft tools, particularly Visual Basic: “The easy stuff is […]

Immature developer attitudes revealed in flames regarding CDBaby

Derek Sivers of CDBaby kicks ass. He got a sophisticated and very very user-friendly, efficient, straightforward e-commerce system (including the back-end systems) written in PHP. Based on what I’ve read, he’s up there with Phil Greenspun in my opinion; that is, he’s among those who understand strategy and customer service and low-level technology and are […]

J2ME: Write Once, Be Disappointed Everywhere

We developers and other nerdy folk are used to using strange and klunky applications that do something special, and we’re used to that trade-off.
Eclipse is an IDE so it’s hard to imagine it not being baroque and difficult to use, requiring weeks of effort to become productive. JBidWatcher has saved me a lot of money […]

Rails, Fixtures, the Test DB, and Test::Unit

From what I’ve seen, Rails’ weakest features lie in the way it prepares the test database and test data, and Ruby’s Test::Unit isn’t much better than the awful but ubuiquitous JUnit that Java developers are accustomed to. I set out this week to impose my preferences on Rails in this area, and that took some […]

Rails and the notion of Stupid Databases Being a Good Idea

For the last few days I’ve been struggling to bend Rails to my will regarding the proper way to assure data consistency. Today I made some progress. This builds upon some research I did a few months ago, and hopefully this is a more or less complete solution to the problem of making Rails work […]