The world of web user interface frameworks is in a continuous movement. If you look at the landscape starting from HTML forms through Struts and Tapestry to the latest achievements like Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight you will see a big demand to make the web applications to look and feel like a genuine desktop software. The former frameworks represent the request-response approach and the latter group I call heavy weight fighters is providing a sandboxed environment (plugin you have to instal in browser prior to use the application) within browser space. Between those two endpoints there is a growing group of AJAX based frameworks gaining more and more popularity with every day. So far they prove to be the best solution for web interface you can choose today. Because its JavaScript in guts there is no plugins required, applications are running smoothly in any modern browsers and developers have access to environment rich enough to build a complex user interface mimicking desktop software. And remember it is AJAX – there is no need to reload page to fetch a batch of fresh data from the server side.
Continue reading “Google Web Toolkit: AJAX development that doesn’t hurt.”
Tags: google, gwt, introduction, ui, web
There is a lot of support to all my crazy projects given by Onoclea.com – a professional hosting service, crafted to fit you needs. Despite the great support I get from the team there are boundaries I cannot cross. One of them is no create/drop database permission for PostgreSQL. This restriction made a clash with Ruby On Rails test routine which is dropping test database without a warning. Luckily that was an easy fix to create. Now I want save your precious time sharing the tip. The only requirement is that you can have PL/pgSQL installed. (Ask your sysadmin if unsure)
Continue reading “Rails Tip: Recreate database before test, not!”
Tags: fix, plpgsql, postgresql, rails, ror, ruby, tip
Working with Eclipse platform for my previous employer I never complained about OSGi platform. The bundles, the life cycle, the services specification – all this together makes a great foundation for properly designed application with a number of reasonable components. But the thing that always bothered me is the obligation to develop service bundles in Java only. More I think about this more it becomes a limitation.
Continue reading “Scripting the bundles for OSGi platform”
Tags: bundle, eclipse, jpython, jruby, osgi, python, ruby, scripting
Today I was searching for movie reviews and I found an unknown Google search feature. The magic appeared when I did a search for the latest part of Batman’s saga. Continue reading “Google search “movie: …””
Tags: cinema, google, howto, movie, search, smart, tip
Eclipse Monkey is a nice project that brings scripting to the Eclipse environment. If was so much excited about that I wrote an introduction (Scripting Eclipse with the Monkey Project: An Introduction) to wider audience. Unfortunately after great start project was slowly but continuously falling into death.
Continue reading “Eclipse Monkey is not dead… yet”
Tags: eclipse, monkey, project, proposal
Lastly my friends bombed me with pictures from the following collection. This is because many of them believe that work at Google is the Holy Grail of every employee. Is it?
Continue reading “Googletraz”
Tags: google, life, thoughts
For those not familiar with the subject following is a short explanation, all experienced readers may skip this paragraph.
Until now it was a bit of extra work to deploy a Ruby On Rails applications because there was no Apache module like mod_php for PHP – to let deployment happen just by copying files to a server. Tools like Capistrano are to help but the Rails community expressed many times how much they miss PHP approach. The situation has changed when guys from Phusion created mod_rails project. Last time I checked it was in a good shape yet missing couple details from the documentation. Despite problems I was stunned with a quick support provided by one of the developers. That was a good sign for the project. Now I feel it is time to check how things are going.
Continue reading “mod_rails revisited”
Tags: apache, deployment, hosting, python, rack, rails, ruby, wsgi
Couple days ago Phussion guys released mod_rails Apache module. The promise is very simple: deploy Rails applications in the PHP way. This is not the best marketing they could have. Rails application deployment is not a big thing – I was deploying applications with shell scripts at no cost at all. Since there is Capistrano tool I don’t think this is a problem at all. The upload-single-file-through-ftp approach is making more troubles than it solves (which files did I change?) and it is not encouraging me to peek at the new toy at all. What I want to see is simplistic installation procedure and the amazing performance (speed is promoted right after the promise of easy deployment).
Continue reading “mod_rails – The Crash Course”
Tags: apache, config, installation, mod_rails, rails, ruby, ubuntu
The simple equation doesn’t impress, isn’t it? However the result is a great thing. It all started about a year ago on the very first meeting of the Warsaw-Poland Ruby community. Guys (this is what I heard) very quickly shifted from talking about Rails to share business experiences with start-ups. This is how Bootstrap.pl was born: a mixture of business and technology served in monthly portions. I like this idea for a simple reason, there is too many geeks ignoring the business world and too many business people without any understanding for technical aspects.
Continue reading “Barcamp + Poland = Bootstrap.pl”
Tags: bootstrap, meeting, poland, presentation, startup
