Ruby On Rails, Tag Soup, Linq Love, and more.Posted by james on July 28th, 2008
In another one of my previous jobs, one of our different projects was running on Rails with Ruby, and I don’t know why, but I was always critical/skeptical of Ruby On Rails. After getting my job at Agencynet and discussing the MVC pattern with my coworker Ben, he started to tell me how great Ruby On Rails was, so I decided that I would take on a new language.
Most of my coworkers have been doing their development with Ruby on macs, and have told me how much of a breeze it is(mainly due to it coming installed already). I finally got everything installed and decided to use the RadRails plug-in for eclipse for my IDE. I began to work through Agile Web Development with Rails and got through the first 5 chapters with no problems, only to find out that I’m working with the 1st edition, which doesn’t cover Rails 2.0, so I decided to stop until later(tomorrow). My initial reaction however is: WOW. I’ve missed out. Never again will i let my Microsoft fan-boyism take precedence to advancing my knowledge/skills.
The more that I keep working with MVC.net, the more i begin to work with having all of my code in one location. In my previous job I had worked with the code behind pages for my server side code, i was pretty adamant about keeping the two separate. As I was reading Jeff Atwood’s post about Tag Soup, I couldn’t help but be in total agreement with what he was discussing.
It’s very easy to get super lazy and just let your code get very sloppy, especially having up to three different types of tags together (JScript, Html,and Server Side). I will admit that I am very new at working with all of my code in one location, so I’ve noticed that some of my pages are indeed a nice helping of tag soup. Luckily, however, Rob Conery has posted a retort to Jeff’s post, in which it goes into good detail on how to clean up Tag Soup with MVC.NET, definately a good read for everyone working with, or hoping to work with the new framework.
A great thing about my job is that we always strive to work with the most current frameworks and components. Ive been getting to use linq and its Linq-To-SQL DAL and I have to say im pretty impressed with it, it has made me respsect IEnumerable and Collections a LOT more now that I get to use them more now. Even if your project or work isnt using it, i highly recommend it.
On to some non-work related Items, one of my favorite brands, Mishka has begun to implement a “custom” clothing editor ala NikeID (which is FAR better executed).
While I see what they’re doing, going for the one shirt a month limited edition type thing, I still think it’s kind of all hype. Plus I’ve never been a fan of the death adder line.
That’s all for today, I’m gonna update again this week with some new hiphop albums i’ve gotten lately, so stay tuned for that, as usual, comments are appreciated, and if you wanna trade links, hit me up at james [AT] agencynet [DOT] com.