Is it going to be Ruby (on Rails) or Java (and J2EE)? Which one is going to be the future hot technology? Well these questions always remain irrespective of some technology is hot at present or in the future. When it comes to Rails or J2EE for web applications there has been interesting discussions and the question from the Java community has always been what about enterprise class applications and scalability of Rails applications? While there is no concrete answers to these questions here is a good interview in OnJava on “Ruby the rival?” The interview is given by leading experts in the J2EE arena who have recently also got into Ruby and Rails and they answer the above questions.

Don’t have time or don’t want to install anything but learn the Ruby programming language? Here is a really cool site “Try Ruby!” that gives you a feel of ruby in 15 mins. The interactive online session allows you to experiment ruby statements with the help of self instructing tutorial everything within the browser. No sweat! Once you get a feel of it you can always download Ruby and get going. You can get the author’s book “Whys Poignant Guide to Ruby” to learn more of Ruby.

Happy Saturday.

If you are a rails developer and want to learn testing individual components of your Rails application here is “A Guide to Testing the Rails“.

“He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” - Confucius

What a good quote it is, learning and thinking has to go hand in hand and cannot be lived one without another. Looks like I do go by that quote. Because as I read this quote in the local newspaper it also made me think, “Have I ever learnt something without thinking or am I just thinking and no-learn person?” Whether I have answer to that question or not it looks like I did learn that quote and thought about it too

Happy Saturday.

Automated build scripts are like any other code that will require some maintenance and enhancements then and there.  The scripts could be reused and altered to different projects or for the same project but how easy it is to do depend upon how clean and maintainable the script is.  Here is a good article from IBM developerWorks “Automation for the people: Remove the smell from your build scripts” that gives few tips on writing a cleaner maintainable automated build scripts.

If you are new to build automation read my series of posts on Build Automation.

It is apparent that the X in AJAX stands for XML, but if you have used AJAX it is most likely that you may not have encountered XML as such anywhere in the request/response. Probably you might not have encountered use of XML because your server is not expecting an XML because as far as the server side is concerned it does not matter whether the request is synchronous or asynchronous. Its job is to serve the request and respond back. But there might be situations where the server might be expecting a XML based request. For example let’s say the server has to communicate with some web service for the response. Then if the request is in XML it saves some time and as a simple translation could be applied to frame the request to be sent to the service. Here is a part “Using XML in requests and responses” from the Mastering AJAX series from IBM developerworks that explains with example of how to use AJAX with real XML request and response.

Satish Talim has created a cool Ruby tutorial site “Learning Ruby“. Those of you who want to learn Ruby online this could be one of the sites that you may want to bookmark and learn Ruby in parallel to your work. You definitely want to get to Rails which is the framework built on Ruby to enable web application development but learning Ruby will help before you get into rails.

Web 2.0 is all about applicationsworking together with internet as the operating platform.  Lifespree Explorer is one of the real examples to this definition.  The objective is to bring together dynamically photos across the world in one page with details.  If you see it as one single application that does all this then you are wrong. The application as such uses the services of Google Maps to bring the world map with zoom features and Flickr to pick up the photos for a particular region/keyword combination.  The technology enablers are Ruby on Rails as language and script.aculo.us for styles.  Brilliantly put together with AJAX it brings the richness and gives a feeling as though tremendous effort has been put in building it as one single application.