TurboGears: Front-to-Back Web Development
03 Dec 2005TurboGears: Front-to-Back Web Development is another challenger to Rails. They’ve got the requisite quick start video. And it seems to be driven by Mac developers. It has Python underneath.
TurboGears: Front-to-Back Web Development is another challenger to Rails. They’ve got the requisite quick start video. And it seems to be driven by Mac developers. It has Python underneath.
Mark’s Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far
Mark describes in great detail his experience of finding a “rootkit” on his system that was apparently installed by Sony. A music cd that he had purchased would not allow it to play through the standard PC media players. The music only worked with the player on the cd which installed the rootkit. In trying to remove it the rootkit disabled his cdrom completely. Without his’s understanding of the Windows OS he would have had to reformat and reinstall Windows.
I had a similiar experience a few weeks ago while removing spyware from someone’s home PC. This one was also likely installed as some copy protection scheme. In the case of the PC I worked on, the spyware was using or possibly hijacked the rootkit.
In both cases the programmer(s) who developed these rootkits did not do a very good job. And like spyware type applications this poorly written software does more to put the victims’ computers at risk than its intended purpose.
Many programmers, and I.T. type for that matter, dream of escaping the ties and dependencies of legacy systems…even systems of their own making. And starting over fresh.
RoR’s is nearly a complete framework in itself. Starting from the data design philosophy there is a Rails way to do it. The MVC model keeps the different parts of the application organized. Rails is well integrated and all the pieces work well together. You can create a complete web/database app in a matter of minutes…BUT…
When you start with a platform (OS) other than the BSD/OSX used by the Rails creators the real world creeps in. There are Rails dependencies that need to be tracked down and installed for your environment. The WebBrick Ruby webserver fits best with rapid Rails development. But WebBrick scales poorly as more folks start using your new Rails web application.
CGI is not a good option for scaling a web application. FastCgi has better performance but configuring it with the popular Apache webserver is a nightmare. When/if it is configured the stability is not what you would commit a critical business application to. The Rails folks say Lighttpd is a better option than Apache…BUT…
If Windows is your platform then Lighttpd is not recommended. Installing and running Lighttpd on the number of Linux flavors that I tried had quirks for each. I am no newbie sysadmin for either Linux or Windows. At a few points I thought fiendishly how these problems would play in the popular Ruby on Rails — Five Minutes webapp videos. There is a good bit of work to be done beyond the eye-candy Mac demos. And with the popularity of Rails at this point this stuff may get done if Rails can maintain its momentum.
Few companies will rip out existing systems in favor of Rails no matter how easy and rapid new apps can be developed. Having a good set of patterns for interfacing a new Rails web application with various legacy systems would go a long way to bringing Rails into the real world…
VMware is currently my favorite virtual machine tool because it does most of what I need. Having a free Player is pretty cool. Even though you cannot create a new virtual machine you can play one that someone else creates. That opens up a few possibilities. And it also has a few gotchas like — how do you deal with licenced software that’s installed on those virtual machines???
But with Microsoft moving strong into this market I suppose VMware couldn’t just sit back. The OpenSource Xen could shake up this whole market.
The commercial software vendors who depend on license revenue must be having nightmares. At least the ones who can see this coming.
More Developers, Less Code [@lesscode.org]
This is a pretty good site with some interesting ideas…