Entries Tagged 'ruby on rails' ↓

Well, up in Beta, anyway.

After an intense summer of activity, and a crunch mode that has lasted for the last three weeks or so, we’re now sending sign-ups to our private beta.  You do need an invitation, but that’s easy to come by: just go to  www.mixx.com and add your email to the list and you’ll soon get your invitation.  Or drop me a note and I’ll get you added to the list.

We’re already generating some discussion, with a nice post on Techcrunch.  It’s here.

And a final note: we’re looking for a good Ruby on Rails developer.  So if you’re interested, or know someone who is, drop me an email at jdzik@aol.com.

In general, I’m really loving working with Ruby on Rails.  (For the non-technical, that is a programming language and development environment.)  I’m astonished at how fast I can build things with it.

But I do have one criticism.  I am frequently finding one certain type of bug that is really annoying to me.  A bug that would not occur in Java or C++ or another strong-typed language.

I  write a valid Rails program.  It fails with strange errors somewhere in the bowels of the Rails infrastructure.  I scratch my head in great puzzlement.  Finally, I realize what happened: I used a variable name that was already used by Rails.  Something like “url” - something that you would expect that I could use.  Ruby never warned me that I was overwriting a Rails variable - that’s perfectly valid.  (Java or C++ would give me a compile error, tell me that the variable already exists.)  Instead, with Ruby things just break.

I change the name of my variable to something a little less general, something like “story_url”.  Suddenly, things work perfectly.

Not only does Ruby on Rails give me no warning, but I have yet to see a set of complete documentation of semi-reserved words (words that I should not use in my Rails application, though the Ruby language allows them).

How annoying!