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RESTful Rails for the restlessNovember 24

QuickStarts-R-Us

As one of the most active Rails trainers on the circuit, I come up a lot against the challenge of introducing RESTful Rails to relative newcomers. It’s a challenge because the REST support in Rails is very high-level and, even for the diligent, basically impossible to understand deeply without a knowledge of the subsystems—in particular, the routing system—on which it is built.

I believe it’s possible, nonetheless, to understand up front how the RESTful support in Rails fits into the subsystems that support it; and I believe that it’s beneficial to gain such an understanding. My purpose is thus to provide a “QuickStart” introduction, not to the practice of writing RESTful Rails applications but to the way the REST support in Rails fits into what’s around and beneath it. If you want to do RESTful Rails but either find it too magical or don’t quite understand how it relates to the framework overall (does it add? supersede? enhance?), then this article may be of interest to you.

You may wonder why I’m not making use of the Rails scaffolding. That is, as they say, “a whole nother” story. Short answer: the scaffolding gives you a quick start, but also a quick end. It explains nothing and leaves you with a lot of work to do to reverse the ill effects of having a lot of “one-size-fits-none” code lying around your application directory.

So no scaffolding. Also, no

Why I am suspicious of the bailout billOctober 3

The bailout bill has just passed. I know very little about economics, little enough that I don’t feel entitled to a strong opinion one way or the other on whether the bill should have passed. But I am suspicious of it.

I’m suspicious of it, for one thing, because of the fear-mongering that has surrounded it; it’s very reminiscent of the ongoing “Terrorists will come and kill your family if the executive branch doesn’t get a blank check for waging undeclared war” campaign, and things in that vein.

But I’m even more suspicious of the bill because of all the rhetoric about how it will help “Main Street” as well as “Wall Street”. I don’t know whether it will or not, but what troubles me is the fact that this kind of rhetoric makes it sound like Congress and the Bush administration are desperate to help Main Street. The fact is that, in general, they’re not.

Every microsecond of every day in the history of this country there have been uncountable opportunities for the government to help citizens with financial problems, difficulty paying for a home, lack of job opportunities, inability to get credit, and all the rest of it. The thrust of the behavior of the government for most of the history of the country has been not to bother helping such people to any significant degree.

Now, all of a sudden, helping Main Street leaps to the front of the congressional and executive agenda. I’m disinclined to buy it. If the

Tracks a-go-go at RubyConf 2008!September 13

Ruby Central is gearing up for RubyConf 2008, which has a fantastic program and which you can still register for (at time of writing, anyway!).

People have noticed, naturally, that we’ve gone over entirely to a multi-track format (except for keynotes and a couple of other special slots). And they’re surprised; we used to be one-track, and then last year we were multi-track but with a good dose of plenary sessions.

So I thought I’d say something about the multi-trackedness of RubyConf 2008, for anyone who’s interested.

The bottom line is that we’ve scheduled multiple tracks because we got so many really, really good proposals. Of course we can’t accept all of them; we can’t be that multi-track. There will always be a cutoff, and where the cutoff comes always involve a judgment call. This time around the judgment was that the number of talks we’d have to exclude, in order to dilute the multi-trackedness significantly, was too great.

In fact, we started drafting a schedule without explicitly discussing the multi-track issue; it mostly emerged from what we jotted down, and then it continued to make sense to us as we started analyzing the track issue more closely.

People have asked whether it’s about the size of the event. It is, in a couple of ways—subtle ways, perhaps, but i

Back from RailsConf Europe 2008September 6

I got home yesterday from RailsConf Europe 2008 in Berlin, and am very happy to say that the event was a major success.

It was particularly gratifying to hear from many attendees that they found the program content more advanced and more instructive than last year. It’s always hard to fine-tune the level of talks across a big program like this, and I’m really glad to have evidence that people overall felt it had gone in the right direction.

Highlights included keynote addresses by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jeremy Kemper, as well as a Rails core team panel discussion with David, Jeremy, and Michael Koziarski. DHH led us through some very interesting thoughts on the notion of “legacy” code, and how that concept plays out with respect to one’s own development and growth as a programmer. Jeremy talked about performance, and masterfully expanded the horizon beyond the shop-worn “Does Rails scale?” stuff to some very specific and powerful techniques for evaluating and adjusting performance.

We also held a “Symposimi” (the name is based on a misspelling in the program; it should have been “Symposium” but came out “Symposimi,” and I decided that sounded really cool!) on the subject of Ruby versions and implementations—who’s using what, what’s targeting what, the pros and cons of moving to 1.8.7 and/or 1.9. A symposimi is a town-meeti

Pseudo-persuasion in online discourseAugust 6

I know it’s pointless—I’m not going to make a dent in it—but I feel moved to say something about the biggest problem in online discourse: pseudo-persuasion.

The term is a bit awkward, but you’ll recognize what I’m talking about because it monopolizes an almost literally incredible proportion of email lists, news groups, blog comments, and IRC chats, and you’ve seen plenty of it. I’m talking about the endless stream of this vs. that. Emacs vs. vi, Ruby vs. Python, Ubuntu vs. Redhat, Mac vs. PC, tabs vs. spaces, and all the monumentally huge and boring rest of it.

Yes, there are interesting comparative points you can make about all of these pairings. Yes, some people make interesting points. I’m not talking about those points. I’m talking about the other 99.99% of online comparative talk, the inexhaustible store of “mine is better than yours” drivel, the vacuous chatter that, despite its vacuity, manages to choke and clog the online world as if it were of substance.

I call it pseudo-persuasion because it sounds like persuasive speech, but isn’t. It is persuasive neither in effect, nor in intent. Millions upon millions of words pour forth—arguments in favor of A and against B, checklists of assertions and accusations, praise of features and denouncement of shortcomings—all delivered in the most fervent persuasive language but not one syllable actually persuading anyone of anything, and not