Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web

My most recent DevX article has just been published. This was fun material to write about because after some experimentation I feel like I have my Ruby on Rails development environment and server deployment strategy just right, at least for my needs. I should mention that although I have been professionally writing Ruby on Rails applications for a few years, I have not yet written an application that will not run nicely on a single server using nginx, memcache, and a few mongrels. I set my development.rb environment for my MacBook and my production.rb environment for the Linux server I am deploying to, and svn is the glue that holds everything together. If you are interested in deploying very large scale applications, my article will not be very useful to you.

Labels: NetBeans, Ruby, Ruby Rails

I just tried the daily dev build (NetBeans 6.1 Dev 200802080008) for OS X. It is almost there for my daily work - my current Java development project (a commercial version of my old NLBean open source project with a new AI NLP module), Scala coding experiments, and new Rails projects all work great. The one problem: I get errors when using existing Rails NetBeans projects (actually, I get the same errors when trying to modify project properties in new Rails projects but new projects can be created with the desired properties). Close, but not quite there. BTW, the Scala NetBeans plugins, which are very new, are looking very good.

Labels: NetBeans

I have been using the Ruby and Ruby on Rails specific NetBeans 6.0 beta 1 for about 2 hours a day for Rails development. Beta 2 (just released today) has good improvements for code completion, popup documentation, and general RHTML editing. Good stuff!

I have blogged about this before: I am tired of using so many different programming languages (Common Lisp, Java, Ruby, Python, C++, Prolog, etc.) on customer projects. I am starting up a new (non-consulting) business so I am reducing the amount of consulting work I will accept. I would like to just do Ruby and Ruby on Rails development - turning down other work unless it is very interesting.

Algorithm development and solving people's problems - that is the fun stuff, not keeping current with a half dozen programming languages and dozens of frameworks.

Labels: NetBeans