JavaScript Needs Blocks
While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes...
JavaScript Needs Blocks
While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes...
Amber.js (formerly SproutCore 2.0) is now Ember.js
After we announced Amber.js last week, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, to our attention. After some communication with the folks behind Amber Smalltalk, we started a discussion on Hacker News about what we should do. Most people told us to stick with Amber.js, but a sizable minority...
Announcing Amber.js
A little over a year ago, I got my first serious glimpse at SproutCore, the JavaScript framework Apple used to build MobileMe (now iCloud). At the time, I had worked extensively with jQuery and Rails on client-side projects, and I had never found the arguments for the “solutions for big apps” very compelling. At the...
Announcing Amber.js
A little over a year ago, I got my first serious glimpse at SproutCore, the JavaScript framework Apple used to build MobileMe (now iCloud). At the time, I had worked extensively with jQuery and Rails on client-side projects, and I had never found the arguments for the “solutions for big apps” very compelling. At the...
Clarifying the Roles of the .gemspec and Gemfile
TL;DR Although apps and gems look like they share the concept of “dependency”, there are some important differences between them. Gems depend on a name and version range, and intentionally don’t care about where exactly the dependencies come from. Apps have more controlled deployments, and need a guarantee that the exact same code is used...
What’s Wrong with “HTML5″
In the past year or so, the term “HTML5″ has increasingly been picked up by the tech press as the successor to “DHTML”, “Web 2.0″ or “Ajax”. When used by the tech press, it is becoming a generic term for “the next generation of web technology”, except that the term “HTML5″ is less precise than...
Here’s to the Next 3 Years
I officially joined Engine Yard on January 1, 2008, about a week before we announced our Series A funding, becoming its twenty-second employee. I was Engine Yard’s very first “Engineering” hire, and I would spend the next year working on Ezra’s Merb project, finally releasing Merb 1.0 at MerbCamp that October. When I joined Engine...
Automatic Flushing: The Rails 3.1 Plan
preamble: this post explains, in some detail, how we will implement a nice performance boost for Rails developers. Understanding the details might help gain the full benefits of the optimization, but you will gain some benefits even if you have no idea how it works. As you’ve probably seen, DHH announced that we’d be looking...
My Common Git Workflow
A recent post that was highly ranked on Hacker News complained about common git workflows causing him serious pain. While I won’t get into the merit of his user experience complaints, I do want to talk about his specific use-case and how I personally work with it in git. Best I can tell, Mike Taylor...
The How and Why of Bundler Groups
Since version 0.9, Bundler has had a feature called “groups”. The purpose of this feature is to allow you to specify groups of dependencies which may be used in certain situations, but not in others. For instance, you may use ActiveMerchant only in production. In this case, you could say: group :production do gem "activemerchant"...
Ruby 1.9 Encodings: A Primer and the Solution for Rails
UPDATE: The DataObjects drivers, which are used in DataMapper, are now updated to honor default_internal. Let’s keep this moving. Since Ruby 1.9 announced support for encodings, there has been a flurry of activity to make existing libraries encoding aware, and a tornado of confusion as users of Ruby and Rails have tried to make sense...
