Comments on: Realtime Application Development Online?

By: Carel

Carel — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:46:42 +0000

Carel’s Feb 7, 2007 response: Thanks for your comments Matt. Matt is a great guy, very smart, Mac user (yes!) and the CEO of Cordata. Check our their website: http://www.cordata.com.

By: Carel

Carel — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:46:07 +0000

Matt Brown’s Feb 6, 2007 comment:
I gotta say, I agree wholeheartedly with the Law(?) of Leaky Abstractions. I have written a few code generators for various languages and purposes, and it always has proven out for me that they are best used to automate a tedium that I don’t care to repeat.

On the subject of Rails, though, I find they have something innovative in their Engine construct. It’s a sort of run-time code generator. Of course, then, I suppose Ruby itself allows for dynamic code generation itself right in the language, so it’s not new there, but it is novel!

By: Carel

Carel — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:45:10 +0000

Carel’s Feb 3, 2007 response: I recently came across Flapjax. I’m not sure where it fits into the development landscape. See http://www.flapjax-lang.org/.

By: Carel

Carel — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:44:29 +0000

Chris Miller’s February 1, 2007 comment:
Hm…. sounds promising. I’ve always been interested but usually dissappointed in auto and psuedo-code generators in much the same way that MS Word gets some of the auto-grammar right but you sure wouldn’t want it to write your final presentation (ie. you still need to know grammar to keep it from doing something stupid)

That said, the website and applets for The Creative Coast Initiative was entirely re-written in Ruby on Rails and after escaping the steep part of the curve, we have been extremely happy with our ability (actually Fitz Haile’s ability) to rapidly build and delpoy a whole range of small tweaks and large appls on a whim.

It also works and plays well with the other kids in as much as CSS, PHP, a little java and AJAX seem right at home in this playpen. This is seriously cool stuff and so far, we haven’t seen a downside.

You can check out the results an see for yourself: http://www.thecreativecoast.org