OStatic

The developers of Django, a Python-based framework for creating and deploying sophisticated Web applications, announced yesterday that they have established the Django Foundation. This foundation, like foundations for Apache and Mozilla, will allow for communal ownership of the Django code, as well as accept donations and pay individuals.

Client-side Web developers work mainly in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, displaying and manipulating data within a Web browser, while retrieving and storing that data on the server. One exciting new entry on this front is SproutCore, a new JavaScript framework that brings a full model-view-controller (MVC) approach to client-side programming. SproutCore gained a great deal of public attention in the last week, since Apple announced that its new MobileMe (formerly .Mac) service uses it.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to find that the number of books about the Ruby language, and about Web development using Ruby on Rails, has soared over the last year. Many books tell you how to write Rails applications, but very few tell you how to put them into production. Deploying Rails Applications, published recently by the Pragmatic Programmers, does try to answer these questions, and does so quite well, introducing a variety of programs and techniques that can make the difference between a painful deployment and a pain-free one.

Databases provide a great way to store information. But more important than that is their ability to retrieve information, and to do so in many different ways. Because database programmers, like all other programmers, don't like to re-invent the wheel, they often turn to reporting software, allowing them to concentrate on what they want to report, rather than how they want it to appear. One open-source reporting tool that is gaining momentum is Ruport, written in the Ruby language. Ruport is designed for use with Ruby applications, including those using Ruby on Rails.

If you're running a Web site, then the last thing you want is to
ﾠ have a broken link.ﾠ Broken links look bad, frustrate users, and
ﾠ confuse search engines.ﾠ Even when links aren't broken, you can have
ﾠ pages that contain bad HTML, or server-side programs that fail when
ﾠ you enter data into them.ﾠ If this is an important issue to you,ﾠ then you should take a look at Tarantula,
ﾠ a Rails plugin that executes a number of simple tasks against your
ﾠ Web site, producing a detailed report (in HTML, of course)
ﾠ describing the URLs that it crawled, and the responses it received
ﾠ from each URL.

RailsConf, the main conference for the Ruby on Rails community, took place in Portland, Oregon over this past weekend. I wasn't able to attend, which is really a shame; I was at the first RailsConf in Chicago in 2006, and learned a great deal from the talks, as well as from the other Rails hackers in the audience. While the social aspects of a conference can't easily be recreated away from the conference, it is possible to watch and read a number of the presentations and lectures from RailsConf 2008. I have been doing that over the last few days, and have a few to recommend to other RailsConf-challenged fans.

The talk of RailsConf, the conference for Ruby on Rails that ended yesterday, was Gemstone's demonstration of MagLev, an implementation of Ruby that not only runs on Smalltalk, but that has access to Gemstone's highly scalable, very fast object database.ﾠ For years, web developers have worked with relational databases; does Gemstone's announcement mean that this is going to change in the near future?ﾠ Or are we getting too excited over a demo, ignoring real-world considerations that explain why relational databases remain popular, despite the aesthetics of object databases?

Coverity recently used its code analysis tools on more than 250 open source projects, in order to assess the general code quality of the software applications. The tests indicated that open source software is already of high quality -- but more interestingly, it found that the code had improved over time, with fewer defects detected this time than previously. What does it mean to find that open source software is continually improving?

Ruby on Rails is one of the hottest open-source technologies around, with many developers calling it the next big thing. And indeed, many new Web sites have been created in Rails -- most notably Twitter. But Rails has long been dogged by accusations that it is too slow and unscalable for enterprise applications, and it didn't help to learn that Twitter might be abandoning Rails, partly or completely, because of these issues. Do Twitter's problems point to an underlying weakness in Rails?