Mike Perham

At FiveRuns, we have a set of installed clients which upload data to our service periodically. Because of the way it is implemented, Rails is quite slow in handling file uploads. Merb is an alternative, albeit much simpler, stack to Rails which handles file uploads in a much saner manner. The performance difference is quite [...]

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I see many, many people confusing terms when it comes to Ruby and Rails. Ruby is a language, just like Java or Python.  Languages have performance problems when they can’t execute lines of code fast enough for whatever reason (poor choice of algorithms, limited resources, etc). Rails is a framework, just like JEE or Django.  [...]

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Interesting article on a high profile failure for Rails. There are two things that strike me here: 1) The idea of a single technology being a silver bullet. Thousands of projects have failed in the IT world when someone decided they wanted a clean slate with the latest technology (e.g Netscape). There’s mounds of data [...]

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Ruby and Rails have been amazingly successful over the last three years in winning the mind share of young and independent developers. One area where Rails has been less successful is with corporations and corporate developers. This is due to a number of factors but one big one in my mind is the lack of [...]

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Here’s a great example of next generation IDEs coming to fruition. When I first started using Rails 2 years ago, I was daunted by the magic occurring behind the scenes and lack of a good IDE which understands and helps me traverse that magic. TextMate and RadRails were the first but CodeGear looks like a [...]

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