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Another Chicago area conference coming up: FITC Chicago 2008, from June 22-23 at the Chicago City Centre Hotel & Sports Club, 300 E. Ohio. We’re even supporters. So what is it beyond the platitudinous “design and technology” event?

Obviously there’s going to be lots of talk about how to develop Flex and Flash applications. Also how to develop online/offline apps with Adobe Air. Heck you’d think Adobe was a sponsor.

If designing RIA’s with Flash/Flex/Air is your thing, you want to be here. It’s not free, but based on last year’s event, well worth the $125-$250 (depending on which sessions you go to).

Update: If you sign up here with our special ninja supporter code of PATH15, you get 15% off.

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I’m nearly at the end of day 1 of RailsConf, and I can report that it’s very, very crowded. The sessions have been great. You can follow along with me and my day at http://twitter.com/noelrap for the minute by minute updates, I’ve been posting there fairly regularly. I’ll do a fuller recap of the conference at the end.

If you are at RailsConf, remember to come up to me and ask for a book, I still have a few to give out. Also, I’ve scheduled a Birds of a Feather session on Saturday at, I think, 8:30, to talk about iPhone and mobile web application development using Rails, especially to talk about the rails_iui plugin.

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I’ve had a running debate with my colleague John McCaffrey on the question of testing. He is a big fan of unit testing and testing in general that examines the smallest possible units to be tested, then assembles them in every larger integration tests. The idea is that if you get the small stuff right, then the larger stuff has a greater chance of being right too.

Come to think of it, I’m a big fan of this approach too. But there are some times that this sort of strict constructionism is insufficient. There are a few instances that a comprehensive system test is necessary. Some instances that come to mind are:

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Despite the hype, Facebook‘s a frontier rather than an established metropolis. There’s still room to ride into town on a white horse and save the day, earning yourself a healthy reward in the process. Exhibit A? The so-so user interface standards of the social network’s most popular applications.

I recently, belatedly started playing Scrabulous with various friends and I’m shocked at the just-okayness of its UI. The lack of an on-screen legend for the mechanics of the variously shaded bonus squares? Puzzling. The drag-and-drop interface for shuffling tiles around in your tray? Maddeningly persnickety. The mismatch between the word lookup feature, which uses thefreedictionary.com, and the application’s own, internal whitelist of valid words? A real bummer.

Scrabulous provides an adequate ripoff of a venerable and justly loved board game. But the rough edges of its user experience suggest that Facebook still has plenty of room for folks who know how to polish a UI till it gleams. Sure, first-to-market advantage gets magnified on social networks. But as these new application platforms mature, I’m convinced user experience design can provide a compelling means of product differentiation.

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In most projects, people tend to separate source and test code into separate directories. However, out of the box, FlexUnit with Antennae is geared toward a single directory which contains all source and test code. I didn’t really want to mix everything together like this, so I modified Antennae to work with a separated structure. Here is the quick and dirty on getting it to work (assuming you’re using FlexUnit .85 and Antennae 1.2.0)

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When migrating our blog posts from TypePad to WordPress, chunks of code presented the biggest problem. There was a lot of variation in how individual authors had marked up their code samples. Then there was the junk markup TypePad had inserted, of its own accord, inside <pre> and <blockquote> elements. In the end, I had get my hands dirty inside individual posts in WordPress. For future posts, however, we’ll be standardizing our markup patterns and using CSS to style code quotes consistently. We’re still working the kinks out of our stylesheets, so please bear with us when reading older posts.

In the meantime, I stumbled upon an informative post by Lim Chee Aun that offers a one-size-fits-all solution for implementing the CSS 2.1 “white-space: pre-wrap” declaration in today’s user-agents. If you’re not familiar with “white-sace: pre-wrap,” it’s a way to honor whitespace and line breaks within preformatted text, yet still allow individual lines to wrap when they reach the edge of their enclosing container. In short, it provides the browser equivalent of the “soft wrap text” option in your favorite IDE or text editor – which in many cases looks better than using “overflow: auto” to create an internal scrollbar on the container.

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Have you ever stored your application’s enumerated types in a database? If you have, you might have also noticed that code will often times “duplicate” this data by defining constants or enums that reference what is in the database. If you’re anything like me, this duplication does not feel right.

With the metaprogramming capabilities of Ruby, we can address the maintenance costs of duplication by generating these constants at runtime.

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It was with great amusement that I read PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter, a recent post from Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis his):

Some of the largest sites on the internet — sites you probably interact with on a daily basis — are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?

The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn’t be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it should never be the choice for any rational human being sitting in front of a computer, I can’t argue with the results.

With all my recent work on the Pathfinder blog migration, I’ve been getting to to know WordPress – and, by extension, PHP – pretty well. Now that the experience is (mostly) over, I’ve got a few observations about WordPress:

• It sucks.
• Its PHP foundation contributes to its suckiness.
• If you’re a developer, it doesn’t suck nearly as bad as other blogging platforms.

Let me elaborate.

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Later this week, I’ll be attending RailsConf 2008. There will be blog posts here, I’m sure, with any interesting info. If you like your updates in 140-character bursts, you can follow my Twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/noelrap.

Thanks to the marketing folk at Wiley, I will be armed with some number of copies of Professional Ruby on Rails to do with what I will. I’ll also have about 500 marketing flyers — I have no idea what to do with those.

The books, though, I plan on giving away. Here’s the deal:

I’m going to be carrying some small number of books each day (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). The first people to come up to me and ask for one get a free book — please do give me your name so I can mention you on this blog and so forth. I’ll be the guy who looks like the picture to the left. Only in color. And wearing glasses.

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After laboring away on Typepad because it was easy and, frankly, we had more important things to do, we have finally made the move to our own in-house blog. It now sits under the web site at http://www.pathf.com/blogs/ and combines our various blogs — Agile Ajax, UXD, Business Rules and Techdev. You can still access all of the sub-blogs individually through their feeds and category pages.

If you run into any issues (which I’m sure you will, given the contortions we had to go through to deal with Typepad’s funky url’s), drop us a line at [email protected].

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