Mike Perham

Got here right in time, checked in at 12:30pm, conference started at 1pm.  The conference kicked off in a great way with a good talk from Neal Ford from ThoughtWorks on DSLs.  Do you know the difference between an internal vs external DSL?  I didn’t.  Internal DSLs are implemented in another existing language and that’s [...]

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Great article with an overview of Rails and how it is slowly changing software development. Obviously I’m one example of the “attracting developers to the latest, greatest framework” point they make in the article.
Austin jumping on Rails

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If you want to autobox an object into an Array, Ruby provides a deprecated method, Object#to_a, to do this.  The better, non-deprecated way is to use Array conversion:
irb(main):001:0> foo = Object.new
=> #<Object:0×15234>
irb(main):002:0> foo.to_a
(irb):2: warning: default `to_a’ will be obsolete
=> [#<Object:0x15234>]
irb(main):003:0> Array(foo)
=> [#<Object:0x15234>]
irb(main):004:0>  a = Array.new
=> []
irb(main):005:0> Array(a)
=> []

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This is exactly the conclusion I came to 2 years ago after playing with Ruby two years ago.  Java was a good leap forward from C but Ruby is the next leap forward IMO now that it has mainstream momentum.
Java is becoming the new Cobol

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We gave up on using Berkeley DB for our metric store. There were just too few advantages over a higher-level solution like MySQL. BDB doesn’t have:

A notion of schema or data types
A query language
Slick integration into Ruby

In the end it would have taken a LOT of manpower to wrap and tune BDB to [...]

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I would think that this is not one of them.

For those not in the know, that’s Marcel Molina, Rails core committer and avowed disco enthusiast, on the left.

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I’ve been going very deep into BDB recently.  There’s a couple things I’ve learned:

The Ruby binding effectively only allows you to store strings, not native types.  So that 4 byte integer will instead take anywhere from 1-10 bytes, depending on the value.
The Ruby binding does support sorting via a Ruby proc but it’s extremely slow.  [...]

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If you are running into “undefined symbol” errors when compiling Ruby extensions, make sure you override the ARCHFLAGS so you aren’t cross-compiling to PPC.  Put this in your ~/.bash_profile and a lot of mysterious compilation problems should go away.
export ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″

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I’ve been working with Berkeley DB in Ruby to do some prototyping of a scalable metric store for FiveRuns. In theory it’s a great toolkit. Rather than using a generic relational database, you can build the exact structures and functionality required to store/retrieve your data. So far, my impression is that the [...]

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On the wall, who’s the fairest Rubyist of them all?

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