Evolutionary Goo

Dell has announced they will be selling PCs and laptops with Linux installed. They haven’t announced the details yet, so I’m very interested in hearing what distribution they decide on.

What I find interesting about this story is how strong consumer demand for Linux swayed Dell into this decision. A few years ago in the heyday of Microsoft/Intel/Dell, I would not have thought this was possible.

With Ruby on Rails (RoR) taking the world by storm, JRuby naturally looks like a great option for Java Web developers. You get the flexibility of the Ruby language and the ability to run RoR applications on the Java platform with little or no effort . Running in a Java environment, your Rails applications can also access your existing Java libraries as well as popular frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate.

However, there has emerged an interesting competitor to JRuby - Grails. Instead of using Ruby as its scripting language, Grails uses Groovy. Groovy is a scripting language built specifically for the Java platform. Grails, has been designed to provide the “coding by convention” kind of productivity that Ruby on Rails provides. Grails also seems to be gaining popularity amongst Java Web developers. Just search the Web and you will find numerous articles on Grails, as well as Groovy, in the last month.

To further complicate matters, Charles Nutter, of the JRuby project, has been talking to Graeme Rocher, of the Grails project, about running Grails on Ruby. In addition to commenting on Grails and Ruby, Graeme makes also some interesting arguments as why to use Grails in the first place.

When making a decision to go down the “Rails” path in Java, I see advantages to both JRuby (with RoR) and Grails. Learning a new framework and scripting language can be very time consuming, so I’m guessing most developers who have decided to go down that path are making a decision between the two. Anyone care to comment on what factors are driving your decision?

Have you ever wanted to pause a TV show on a TV that isn’t hooked up to a digital cable box and digital video recorder?

I have released a new version (0.9.3) of JEval. This version allows for custom function to explicitly control the function return type. This isn’t a big release, but does fix a bug in the substring function. And if you’ve been writing your own custom functions, this release might help you out in situations where its not easy to determine if the the return type should be a numeric or a string.

Is it just me or does it seem like there hasn’t been that much coverage of Microsoft’s recent comments on Ruby? Microsoft says “they have a lot things going on (with Ruby), but nothing to announce at this time”. This seemed like big news to me and got me interested in what’s going on with Ruby for .Net, so I did some looking around.

It turns out there is a project, Ruby.net, already in development. The project Web site also says that Microsoft is “providing financial and technical support for the project”. Hmmmmm.

Its been very well publicized that Sun hired two members of the JRuby team. And just a week or so ago, Sun made some big annoucements regarding Ruby support in the NetBeans IDE. The fact that Sun is already on board with Ruby and that Microsoft seems close to doing the same is a huge development.

Companies developing on both the J2EE and .Net platforms will soon be able to have their developers code for both platforms using one language. While Ruby is already hugely popular with the Web 2.0 crowd, the adoption of Ruby in the enterprise has not been as fast. But if what I read in the blogosphere is any indication of reality, then there are a ton of enterprise developers already learning and evaluating Ruby and Rails. So if Microsoft jumps on board to offer formal support for Ruby to the level Sun has, I’m betting we see an explosion in Ruby development to a much higher degree than we have seen already.

Update 4/30/2007: Microsoft announces IronRuby.

Apparently, all of our hard work has been paying off.
http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3665396

For Firefox users only. Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on that lets you record, playback, edit and debug tests in your Firefox browser. You can even make assertions within your tests. I have been using Selenium IDE to playback standard tests that I execute after making changes to my applications. Selenium IDE is actually part of the bigger Selenium product. You can read more about it on the Selenium/Selenium IDE Web site.

Selenium IDE

… doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

ComputerWorld has a good article today on how to keep your Internet searches private. Good stuff if you worry about such things.

The best thing I took from the article is learning about Ixquick. Ixquick is yet another Internet search engine. But unlike the other popular search engines, Ixquick guarantees to keep your searches private by deleting their search history every 48 hours.

Nvu is a high quality Web authoring system for Linux, Windows and the Mac. I like Nvu because it is open source and has a very nice WYSIWYG HTML editor. I use Nvu for prototyping HTML pages when developing dynamic Web sites, as well as maintaining static HTML Web sites. If you used Mozilla’s Composer HTML editor in the past, you might recognize some of the features in Nvu. Nvu was started using the Composer code base.

I was concerned about Nvu, because there has not been an update since the middle of 2005. On the Nvu Web site FAQ, I see that Nvu is “being completely redone to take advantage of new features in the Firefox development branch”. Another encouraging sign is that the support forum is very active. I’m looking forward to the next release as I assume it will work with Firefox in one way or another.

Nvu

I have released a new version (0.9.2) of JEval. This version features support for nested functions calls and also allows for the use of a custom variable resolver.