Pervasive Code

The Ruby on Rails story is usually presented to the new developer as a wonderful break from tradition that makes a developer’s life so much better than the frameworks of the past. The clattering of skeletons in the closet you’re hearing? Well, that’s because it makes the sysadmin’s life much worse than PHP or Java. That just improved on Friday, with the release of mod_rails. If you’re looking for a way to do shared (or low traffic) hosting of Rails applications, this is for you.
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The Android mobile phone software platform from Google has some journalists and developers confused due to its license terms. The terms are open source, but not as free as the GNU Public License. That decision has people wondering what Google’s up to. I have a theory about why they did this.

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It turns out that as The New York Times says, Google is not building a phone. They’ve built (bought, really) a phone platform called Android. It’s Java on Linux, and it’s open source, but notably it is not J2ME based. Reportedly it will run J2ME apps, but the SDK makes the Android API look more like the BlackBerry’s Java API than J2ME. It’s a full featured API that isn’t a least common denominator of all possible mobile devices.
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Technical Architecture is a Form of Investing. I’m reminded of this sort of thinking because of recent news from RubyConf 2007.
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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 easy, but the hard stuff is impossible.” There’s a parallel between VB and Rails in this instance, in that if you only let yourself use the high level tools, the hard stuff is impossible, but the designers specifically tell you to do the hard stuff using a lower level toolset. The controversy that surrounds “X can’t do everything, therefore it sucks” should really be focusing on the feasibility of going through that trapdoor to do things “the hard way”. This is what Delphi did, which is why so many folks chose it over VB; it made the hard stuff easier.

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