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Photo: Blue Sky On Rails by ecstaticist

The Rails 2.2 release contains a number of big features that are going to be commented on endlessly, especially thread safety, internationalization, and ETag support. Going through the various release notes and what’s new documents, I found a lot of smaller features that I’m looking forward to using in future projects, or would have made past projects easier, or are just cool in a framework-geek kind of way.

The concat method no longer needs a block binding

This may be the most subtle change I’ve ever been this excited about. Let’s go back to the bad old days — last week — and say that you wanted to write a block helper method like this:

I’ve been beating the drum of cloud computing and the advantage that it gives to companies building solutions on Linux. Microsoft needed to respond. Well, now we have two solutions for Windows on demand:

• Amazon EC2 is offering Windows on EC2, with the pricing at $0.125 per hour for a small instance running Windows Server (as compared to $0.10 for a Linux instance). You can run SQL Server Express at no extra charge. The SQL Server Standard smallest instance (Stadard Large) rings in at $1.10 per hour, however, which ain’t such a good deal.
• Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform. It’s still in community evaluation mode, but there is one thing that is already clear about it: it’s as confusing as all git out. One of the advantages of Amazon’s services like S3 and EC2 is that they are simple and can form the building blocks for other applications and services.

If I’m provisioning a web application, I’m pretty comfortable thinking in terms of virtual servers or instances. Not sure how to think about scaling and cost with Azure. I think MS would have done better to start out with a KISS approach to drive adoption. Time will tell if their “it can cure cancer” approach will work out.

Promotional image from envycasts.com

This week, Rails 2.2 Release Candidate one was loosed on an unsuspecting public. Friday, I’ll post about the Rails 2.2 features that I’m most excited about working with. Today, I’m going to review Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer’s screencast on new Rails features (and the associated PDF document by Carlos Brando and Carl Youngblood.)

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that we received a review copy of the screencast. In the interest of fuller disclosure, I’ll add that had the email from them come even 10 minutes later than it did, I would have already bought it myself (I really was just about to go to their site and buy when I got the email) — I really liked their first screencast on ActiveRecord. And I really liked this one, as well.

There is much out there on the topic of migrating to Ruby on Rails for an experienced Java programmer. I figured I’d add my two cents, as I have finally drunk the Kool-Aid. I switched to Ruby on Rails late last year, and developed a subscription and content management system in Ruby on Rails, went back to a Java project, and then back to Ruby on Rails. The switch back to Java gave me an interesting insight into the things I love and hate about both development platforms.

I’ve been developing with GWT, OpenSocial and Orkut, using the gwt-google-apis project on Google Code (specifically the gadgets subproject). It’s a nice enough api that makes it relatively painless to build gadgets in GWT.

This is a bit different from Didier’s gOpenSocial library, which was an early success at building OpenSocial gadgets with GWT. But the google gadget library isn’t really quite ready for OpenSocial. I’ve skinned my knee here and there, so I thought I’d give others the benefit of my experience.

So, first thing, how the heck do I get GWT to generate the

line into my manifest?

The thing is, like a lot of programming language fans, I’m fascinated by programming as communication, and therefore also by thing like style guides that bridge the gap between the formal requirements of the compiler and the cognitive needs of the programmer writing and reading the code. At best, consistent style makes code easier to produce and read in much the same way that Rails itself makes code easier to produce and read — by suggesting a consistent placement for your code and reducing unneeded choice in the name of useful conventions.

For me, at least, there’s also something of a pride in workmanship issue, in much the same way that a professional chef will take pride in keeping their kitchen area clean even in the midst of chaos.

So, thanks to those of you who took the time to comment on the style guide I posted last week. I am planning to put the guide up someplace more permanent where the conversation on these issues can continue, but in the meantime, I wanted to promote some comments and talk a little bit more about a couple of issues that were flagged by commenters.

The JSON utility library for GWT that I blogged about last week is now up on google code.

To recap, the idea is that you can write code like this

JSONValue root = JSONParser.parse(json);
JSONWrapper obj = new JSONWrapper(root);
String result = obj.get("map").get(1).stringValue();

when dealing with JSONValue objects.

As it’s only one class, you could just include it in your source tree as code instead of using the jar.

All languages have something interesting to teach us about the art of programming — and as a Ruby developer almost exclusively, I’ve always been afraid of strongly typed languages like Java and C++, or the great-grand-daddy of them all, C. So when I decided to tackle Cocoa to work on iPhone apps I went in somewhat leery of how I’d have to change, but hopeful that I’d become a better, more versatile programmer. After a few weeks I would say I’ve achieved my goal, but it’s certainly taken a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get here.

I think a lot of people are in a similar position to me: trying to pick up Objective-C to do iPhone programming, and coming in with only a book or two as their guide. Most of the books out there for learning Cocoa and the iPhone SDK are very good but there are a lot of gotchas and stylistic tricks that really mean the difference between comprehending a statement and staring at it in horror and confusion until Google comes to your rescue. The aim of this blog post is to come to your rescue instead of Google. These are the 8 biggest foul-ups that I wish I had known before I started learning Objective-C. Hopefully you’ll learn something here that will prevent you from making an idiotic mistake I already made.

I went to the AT&T store on Friday to buy another testing phone for our developers, who are busily churning out more iPhone applications, and to switch one of my cell lines over from T-Mobile to my iPhone.  It was an interesting experience, with T-Mobile’s very friendly and courteous customer service reps pitching me strongly on the G phone, and my service getting switched over in the middle of a business call.  I asked the AT&T store manager what percentage of their sales were iPhones, and after a bit of thought, he said about 65%.

Granted, that’s only one location, but based on all of the annecdotal evidence I have, as well as how well the T-Mobile folks were trained to deal with the iPhone switch (not only on my request, but on my wife’s similar call last week) I am expecting some pretty strong numbers form Apple tomorrow.

I’m also expecting decent G phone numbers for Q4, but I’m not sure how well they’ll hold up later.

Update: It looks like Apple’s Q4 iPhone sales topped 6.9 million, about 800,000 units more than RIM’s 6.1 million in the equivalent period, beating most analyst expectations by a mile.

Interesting discussion on this over at Daring Fireball (of course) as well as a piece on Fortune on traditional analysts versus bloggers on Apple sales and earnings.  The bloggers got the iPhone numbers better than the analysts, but everyone missed on mac sales.

Related Services: iPhone Application Development, Custom Software Development

As Ajax spreads new UI conventions to the masses, it’s important to apply a critical eye to the usability of those conventions. Several big-name sites have launched extensive redesigns in the last few months, from Twitter and FriendFeed to Flickr and Facebook. Certain trends are solidifying, especially the use of context menus that are hidden until a user mouses over an item, then displayed as a series of icons, text or both.

First up we have Flickr, whose homepage redesign emphasizes the social networking aspects of the service. A Recent Activity feed, modeled on Facebook’s iconic News Feed, showcases favorites and comments from your contacts. The default view for each item displays its age. When the user hovers, though, the same real estate becomes home to two icons. One allows you to add your own comment; the other “mutes” activity related to that photo and removes it from your feed. Neither option is represented by an industry-standard icon, and no tooltip is provided. Even the status bar shows only an inscrutable URL: a hash sign.