Floyd’s Thoughts…

Bourbon Creams and Bananas are not a balanced diet.

Phusion Passenger on Amazon EC2
Some useful stuff relating to Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) on Amazons Elastic Computing Cloud.

Moving from Java to C#
A senior ThoughtWorker talks about his first C# project 10 years after he first tasted the Java bean.

IPhone GUI PSD
Some photoshop goodies for mocking up IPhone UI’s.

I love Rails and use it all the time, fortunately the company i work for builds web products that lend them selves to the Rails way, however we also do consultancy work for larger Enterprise companies where Rails doesn’t lend itself so well.

I’d love to see Rails include features that would ease its adoption within the enterprise, here are a few things that i’d like to see:

Better support for Windows
Now it hurts me to say this as everybody here loves OS X and our products are built for OS X or linux deployment but many (i’m inclined to think most) enterprises use Windows for deployment of internal intranet apps.

With the release of Mod_rails, deploying ruby apps into production is now only easy its reliable, Enterprises organizations need both of these things, but i think they need them on windows too.

Support for Stored Procs
Now i now its pretty easy to add this support (and i will get to that later) but having Stored Procs support baked into Rails would make using Rails in a enterprise environment so much easier.

We have been to many large companies to build large internal intranet applications and in every one of them we have had to interface with legacy systems via APIs that are exposed by stored procs.

Telling a client that you are going to use Rails in this environment consistently produces a look of horror from the clients technical guys and follows with a Rails can only do Object Relational Mapping discussion.

Any (that i have met) technical architect in the corporate work will dismiss rails for its (perceived) lack of Stored Proc support.

I’d like to see this functionality baked in to rails and advertised as a “Feature”.

Integrated Development Environment
Right now i can think of at least 6 IDE’s that support rails and thats not including TextMate (which i use).

Of all the IDE’s that i have tried NetBeans is the best, it has good all round support for rails but even still, its miles away from what a corporate developer would consider a good IDE for rails development.

Developers need refactoring tools in any language but the need for good refactoring is greater with dynamic languages, netbeans has one refactoring option enable when using rails “Rename” and even that doesn’t safely rename.

Now i’m not suggesting we need Resharper for rails before corporate developers adopt rails but somewhere in between resharper and what we have now would be a good start.

Address the Scaffolding Myths.
Every rails developer knows that scaffolding was (pre rails v2.x) pretty useless but served a good purpose in helping to increase the Buzz around rails with the promise of one click application stubs.

In rails 2.0 scaffolding is Slightly more useful in that it creates nice Restful controllers and some pages to help you get going with the first few resources in your application however, the Rails community needs to address the perception thats rails is all about scaffolding.

So many times i have had conversations with Tech Leads, Development Managers, Developers, etc about rails being more than scaffolding, usually they are amazed to hear that most rails developers don’t even use scaffolding in there apps.

Its as if this great little feature of rails is holding it back in the minds of “serious” corporate developers, who don’t see scaffolding for what it is.

Database Support
Active Resource is an amazing piece of work, I often go through the Code Base to see how certain things are done and find myself gushing over the code in there its amazing…

However, since Rails v1.2.6 the core team seem to have lost interest in Databases other than sqlite and mysql, which is all good and well for the the Web 2.0 community, however corporate guys need Oracle and/or Microsoft SQL Server support out of the box, and it seems that using either of these engines now requires extra gems and some hacking around. I have had many conversations with devs who “tried” to use rails but couldn’t get it to connect to Oracle. After looking around the web they often got frustrated by the contradicting and out of dat solutions to this problem and gave up.

If rails is living on its promise to give database independence and Rapid development thought active records object relational mapping magic it can’t force corporate developers down a wild goose chasing for gems, it need to work - Out of the box.

The Solution…
Well rails is young and i’m certain that these issues will be resolved given time, however i think its the responsability of all rails developers to increase its presence in the Corporate world when and where ever we can.

As such I’m going to start a Rails in the Enterprise site where issues such as the ones i have highlighted can be discussed, resolved and communicated to the corperate world.

I’m like to see this site become a one stop resource for corporate developers who are trying to use rails.

Estimating is one of those tasks that really takes it out of the whole team, hours or even days of reviewing stories and estimating the effort is hard work.

The temptation is to crack on and keep going until the task is done however I can’t stress enough the importance of taking time away from this process to recharge and re-engage with the subject mater.

Some techniques for making the process less onerous (if thats possible):

Story Rotation
Often teams will follow a story list as it define by the BA, which in my opinion can lead to less informed estimates, having discussed the attributes of one story only to be presented with another similar story can often lead to dismissive estimations where in isolation the story may reveal more detail.

Take Breaks
Accept that a fresh mind is better at dealing with problems, taking a break is one of the most productive things you can do.

Give everyone a stage to express their opinion
So often the dev lead will take up most of the air space while more “junior” members of a team will sit nodding (or nodding off). Give your whole team a chance to engage in this process after all you will expect them to work in this project right?

Have Fun
Enjoy the process by making it fun! Use novel gestures for estimating or high five when you all agree, whatever it is you guys do that is fun, do it and do it more often, having a laugh will make the most onerous of tasks less so.

Estimating has to be one of the tasks i “enjoy” the least however, its value is without question.