RubyRX NC

by Chris Wash on Feb.25, 2009, under Meta/Blog

The first Ruby I looked at was actually back in 2002, well before Rails, during college as part of a group project in a programming languages course. At the time, most of the information my team could find on it was in Japanese. I looked at Rails initially in 2005 and found some things I thought were lacking in the framework. I never pursued it much more than that because I didn’t feel like paying the early adopter tax. It had some growing up to do. But seeing as how I recently have been working with Prototype a lot, which aims to almost turn Javascript into Ruby, (a few plugins will get you even closer…) I’ve found a renewed interest in Ruby. I figured I’d take a closer look at what is going on in Ruby-land and to that end, I drove down to RubyRX in Durham, NC last week.

Career 2.0

Jared Richardson recently published a new book based on some ideas he’s been floating around in talks for a while. Jared stopped in at the Richmond JUG recently to give a talk and we were all really intrigued and entertained with his presentation. I was fortunate to pick up a copy of Career 2.0 while I was at RubyRX and it’s a great handbook for investing in your knowledge portfolio through sharing knowledge. There are a lot of useful tips on how to improve your writing, speaking and networking skills. Take a look at the book’s blog for more info.

Dr. Nil

I was interested in seeing Nathaniel Talbot’s talks. I had already seen his talk The Fear of Programming in video, which he has refined a bit and created an alter-ego “Dr. Nil” (Phil?) by asking developers to talk about their feelings/emotions and how that influences how you think and act. It was a very interesting talk. I also saw his talk Five Skills Every Freelancer Should Have and he’s floated the idea of spinning that off into a book. Keep an eye out for it!

HAML and SASS

These technologies were mentioned in a few different talks I attended and I found them interesting because what I’ve never liked about Rails is that its view templates had code snippets in them. This leads to tag soup and has been discouraged in JSP and other areas for a while now. I’ll blog more on this in another post. But HAML and SASS take an interesting approach. I have my doubts about whether or not it will gain the traction needed to make “pretty” templates a bigger issue. From what I hear, (and feel free to correct me if I am wrong) it seems some of the more prominent voices out there aren’t sold on it yet and have strong feelings about the whole idea.

Build Up Vs. Build Down

I write here often about what I’ve been doing with Seam and Java EE. Seam’s success has come from the philosophy that a developer’s job will be easier if there is a simple interface to a deeply integrated set of powerful frameworks. Grails has a similar philosophy. A common thread in talks I attended at RubyRX was the idea of building down instead. Seeing all of the neat tricks you can do with metaprogramming, this makes a lot of sense for Ruby and many frameworks in the Ruby world take advantage of this idea. There are some very interesting implications with these two paradigms and how they affect code reuse. But that’s another blog post…

It’s All Been Done Before…

Rick DeNatale gave a very interesting talk on the history of dynamic-typed languages and their parallel evolution along with static-typed languages. I always find talks about how languages have evolved to be fascinating, especially if you consider there are a number of problems that we just keep solving over and over again every 20 years. There is wisdom gained in knowing how we got to the present, and I’d like to think these kinds of discussions leave you with insights about where we’ll go from here.

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:Career2.0, HAML, Language History, Metaprogramming, Rails, Ruby, RubyRX, SASS

3 comments for this entry:

Joachim
February 26th, 2009 on 5:16 pm
Chris,

thanks for your impressions.
I want to hook into ‘HAML and SASS’.
After 6 years of Java I’m mainly developing in ruby these days. When doing a webapp, I alway choose Erb.
Im my templates the code is checking whether the
collection to display is filled or not and if so loop over it.
I wouldn’t call that tag soup !
All the designers I’m working with can cope with the bit of ruby code within the templates.
When I did jsps I was loosing so much time with tags which did not fullfill me needs. The reuse of self created tags was not as frequent as I thought it would.
Later I was using velocity and freemarker as template language. That’s code in templates isn’t it ?!
From this perspective a bit of ruby in my views really doesn’t bother me. But I started to hate the concept of tags. I was evaluating Grails around christmas and a real showstopper for me was it’s view technologie.
I’m doing webdevelopment since 1997 and a lot of template engines / languages / technolgies came along.
My experience is that at the end of the day all these abstractions don’t pay off.
Chris Wash
February 28th, 2009 on 10:46 pm
@Joachim

Thanks for your comment. I had a feeling someone would call me on this.

Here’s how I feel about it — The idea of a server-side markup format that designers and coders will both be able to understand is a pipe dream. It has never truly been what good templating was about. It’s just a sales pitch for tool vendors and on real-world projects it never works out that way.

The closer your templates can be to the markup they spit out (obviously with duplication removed), though, the better. It makes your job as a coder easier.

I agree with you, if you do ERB the way you propose, I doubt you’ll have any problems. But if that’s all that you’re using code in your templates for, isn’t there a more succinct (and less dangerous) way of getting that done? Your templates are views and not application code. When people have code at their fingertips in views, they tend to do crazy things with it. It flies in the face of “separation of concerns” and MVC in general. HAML/SASS looks like a decent way to do that. I like the Unified EL that has been up and coming in frameworks like Seam, because they give you a way to consistently traverse collections throughout all layers of your code (in templates, logging statements, in configuration code, in injection code, etc.)

My reservations about code in templates are for those people that still pervasively use it in spite of other more expressive and less cryptic ways of doing things. Code in templates in the hands of someone that doesn’t have a good idea of how templating works turns all of your view code into tag soup. And my experience has been that happens *a lot* and I’ve just grown tired of cleaning up the messes.

What do you think? Thanks again for your comments.
Andy
March 3rd, 2009 on 2:42 pm
I’ve done a fair bit of JavaEE front-end development and one thing I’d add is that: from my experience, a ton of scriptlet code in your JSPs is a tell-tale sign of other problems lurking in the code base. For example, overly-relying on static classes/interfaces, etc.

To your point, too much code in view templates typically foreshadows various violations of OO.