Category Archives: Software Development

Software Development

SVK Aquired by Best Practical

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I’m a little behind on the mailing lists, but I found that on June 5 it was announced that Best Practical Solutions, LLC has aquired SVK. SVK is a distributed version control system written on top of Subversion and provides the ability to mirror Subversion and CVS repositories to your local machine in order to work in a distributed fashion. It also provides advanced branching and merging capabilities far and above what the core Subversion product provides. Read the official announcement here.

Best Practical, LLC produces Open Source incident response, request tracking, and FAQ management software. Chia-liang Kao, the author of SVK, has joined Best Practical as a partner.

List of Languages I have coded in …

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Tom the Architect’s latest posting details a list of languages he has coded in. I thought this would be a pretty interesting exercise, so thought I would throw one together as well:

  1. BASIC (quite a few flavors from old school CP/M up to Windows)
  2. xBase
  3. DataFlex
  4. C
  5. C++
  6. x86 Assembler (light, but still counting it)
  7. Pascal (Turbo / Quick)
  8. Unix Shell (BASH. KSH, etc)
  9. Java
  10. JavaScript (light, but I think it still counts)
  11. Perl
  12. Python
  13. PHP
  14. Ruby

You know what? That wasn’t a very interesting exercise. Thanks a lot Tom …

Ruby on Rails – WOW

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Over the last couple of weeks I decided to re-familiarize myself with the Ruby programming language. I was first introduced to it back in 2002-2003 at OOPSLA (or was it the Software Development Conference?) when I took a full day workshop with the Pragmatic Programmers, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt.

Back then I loved the language, but decided not to focus on it since the support in the form of libraries just weren’t there like they were for Python at the time. I wrote a few programs in Ruby, but left it to the side and focused on Python.

Well, those days are over. When I started with Ruby, I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails as well. Over the last couple of weeks all of my spare time has been focused on learning the Ruby language and this completely awesome framework, even at the expense of regular podcasts.

First off, I’m absolutely enamoured by the language. So much so that with Rails piled onto it I couldn’t imagine programming in any other language. For quite a while I’ve hated Java and the complexity that it brings to projects. There’s just too much work involved in doing Java development anymore.

Ruby combines complete object orientation with the flexibility of a scripting language. Some of the features it has baked into it, such as iterators and blocks make life so much easier.

Now pile Rails on top of it. Rails is an elegant MVC framework written in the Ruby Language by the folks over at 37 signals. These two things combined make for the perfect programming environment for web applications.

I’m still on the steep end of the learning curve. I’ve got the Programming Ruby : The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series) constantly at my side as I pull my hair out trying to learn all of this stuff.

But the cool thing is, even with my unfamiliarity with the language I’m still productive. If that isn’t the sign of a great development environment, I don’t know what is.

I’m working diligently to become proficient in the language. Rails is a little complex and I’m still struggling to learn all of the conventions. However, I think most of my programming moving forward will be with these tools. Its just a lot easier to spend time thinking about the problems you are trying to solve and being able to express them eloquently rather than struggling with the complexity and code/compile/run process baked into Java development.

Subversion Support Now LIVE on SourceForge

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After quite a long time of announcements and speculation as to when it would happen, Sourceforge has finally gone live with their support of Subversion as a source control option for their service. Following is a clip from the SourceForge mailing list:

The SourceForge.net team is pleased to announce the General Availability
of Subversion service to SourceForge.net-hosted projects, effective
2006-02-21. This service offering is in addition to our existing CVS
service; as with all of our services, projects may select (and enable in
the project admin pages) the portion of our offering that best meets
their needs.

The best thing about finding this announcement was the fact that Ben Collins-Sussman, one of the developers of Subversion, posted the announcment to the Subversion developer list with the following comment:

So, are we done? Have we made a compelling replacement for CVS? 🙂

Congratulations to the Subversion team for making the original vision real. I would say the product is a pretty compelling replacement.

Transparent Commodity Infrastructure and Web 2.0

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Tom the Architect pointed me over to this article called Transparent Commodity Infrastructure and Web 2.0. Excellent piece.

I especially like this quote here:

Let me use an example: back in 1998 if you were building a web-based startup, you were probably running on Solaris/SPARC and using an Oracle database. You were also likely to be running on some sort of a Java servlet engine (though there were exceptions, this was again the leading edge). This huge apparatus usually required at least 1 of the following: DBA, sys-admin, release manager, and build manager– nevermind all of the consultants and vendor people that it took to solve problems that arose from trying to get everything working together.

Fast forward to 2005. Anyone still using Solaris/SPARC for web apps is either a moron or a depressed Sun shareholder. MySQL and Postgres are now considered “enterprise-grade,” and if you should be so masochistic as to still want to do Java development on the app-tier, you’ve got Tomcat, Jetty, and even JBOSS available to you on your platform of choice.

I couldn’t agree more. So many companies stuck in the 90’s … excellent article and worth a full read.

Dreamhost Now Providing One-Click Subversion Support

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My web hosting provider DreamHost has added Subversion to its list of software available through its one click installations. The service provides Subversion running under Apache.

If your looking for a Subversion provider, DreamHost might be it for you. Their prices are pretty reasonable. I’ve been with them since 2001 and have no complaints whatsoever. Excellent service and you can admin things quite easily through their control panel.

If you want to check them out, hit the DreamHost link on the right to tell them I sent you. 😉