Ruby

Tonight I attended my second NovaRUG meeting. Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmer discussed the Ruby object model and Paul Barry discussed Merb. There seems to still be a lot of development and refinement of the language and implementations at this point (including the best frameworks like Rails, Merb, and ORM). There is a good chance that Ruby will be a great language for rapidly creating high quality applications.

1. It has a very strong object model.
2. It has good support for unit testing.
3. Syntax is simple.
4. There is a decent developer community to support and champion it.
   

It will still take a high commitment to execute at the craftsman level, but with good methodologies I think some great code can be developed. I am currently researching the best book for an introduction to the language. Suggestions?

New O'Reilly Title

Thanks to a colleague, I recently came across this book that is being created O'Reilly Software Craftsmanship: From Apprentice to Journeyman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. It builds on The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas and the Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative by Pete McBreen.

As they point out, the book is not available yet. But you can comment on the chapters as they are being written. What I like so far is it seems to blend the pragmatic examples of the earlier Dave Thomas book with the principles presented in McBreen's book. It appears that the book is very early in development (for example Chapter 1 references what you learned in Chapter 3) and maybe has some reorganization down the line. But the ideas are worth considering for any software craftsman and I am eager to see what the final product is.

Technorati Profile

CIO&CTOLive! Awards Ceremony

Attended this Tech Council of Maryland event last night. I didn't hear any mention of software development, but the emphasis on the strengthening role of IT in business strategy made it clear that methodologies which connect the technologist to the business side of the house (such as Agile Software Development) are going to be key.

Java Persistence API

Is anyone using
this yet?

I am thinking of using hibernate in a new project, but wish the Java Persistence API was implemented by Apache.

JSF and MyFaces

I am going to develop a new site with JSF. I want to keep the code very clean and like a lot of the features. I am also checking out Apache's MyFaces. Has anyone used it in production? If so, I'd love to hear the pros and cons. I am also interested in the learning curve for both JSF and MyFaces. I will be blogging more about the quality of these technologies.

Practices of an Agile Developer

I recently attended a XPWDC meeting in which Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the Real World (Pragmatic Programmers) was discussed. It looks like an interesting follow-up to the Pragmatic Programmer series. If you have read it please leave a comment. I believe The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master and Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative are both wonderful books and will be reading the Practices of an Agile Developer ASAP.

Testing DataGrid inline editing

Has anyone figured out how to test inline editing of a DataGrid with NUnitAsp? It appears that there is now aspid to reference the edit button on each row.

Thycotic.TddStarterKit

Just wanted to mention Thycotic.TddStarterKit from Thycotic Software Ltd. From the site:

Thycotic.TddStarterKit is a collection of useful tools and extensions for NUnit and NUnitAsp that solve some of our commonly encountered problems on TDD projects. It includes:

One of the many useful methods I found was that instead of writing:

Assert(Browser.CurrentPageText.IndexOf(expression) != -1);

I can now write:

AssertContains(Browser.CurrentPageText, expression);

NUnitAsp Browser Headers?

For many online applications it is necessary to set headers in the client. Has anyone figured out how to do this with the NUnitAsp Browser?

Looks like the HttpClient class has only private methods for getting at the Request (which is where the headers are). Unfortunately many corporations need standard test harnesses so it isn't an option for me to just rewrite NUnitASP.

Waterfall 2006

For those looking for something to do on April 1st check out this.