Posted by Kresimir Bojcic on March 28, 2009
Finally the porting day has come, I only have little time but that’s better then noting. Besides if I never start, I’ll never get anything done. OK here comes nothing 
rails GOSJAR
So far so good. I’ll add it to beanstalk (cool rails app for svn btw.) really quick and get on with it. My first idea was to port database from SQL2005 to MYSQL, I would have to rename a couple of tables to conform to rails pluralisation and that would be it. Then I thought best thing is to port .css and try to work my way from Wilson master pages to Rails layout page. One thing is bothering me – I have custom made tab control to switch between pages. I know there is rails plugin for this, but no clue how to use it, also I have custom breadcrums control that is working beautifully. (more…)
Posted by Kresimir Bojcic on March 22, 2009
I’ve written small application that is supposed to help customers organize things related to the state of their street lights system. 
Customer usually beeing a city department. If you want to check it out username and password is test/test. One word of caution – it’s in Croatian. I think you can figure it out. It’s written in ASP.NET. Since it was a freelance deal I’ve tried to minimize development time and thus I cutted a lot of corners. (It was a mutual agreement so I’ve charged a lot less, it’s not like it was a rip off or anything). I’ve used subsonic (a bit tuned up to support user roles for scaffold grids – if someone wants this, send me an e-mail, be aware that it’s not the latest subsonic available), (more…)
Posted by Kresimir Bojcic on March 6, 2009
I remember watching rails screen cast few years ago. It was really magical. Command prompt and text editor. Miracle was happening right in front of my eyes. That screen cast made me wonder about Rails, it made even want to learn Ruby. I guess it had same effect for many other people.
Couple of days ago, I’ve noticed that NetBeans has a ROR plugin. It made perfect sense, but after I used it for a while there was that feeling “hey this is same thing as everything else”. It’s just some smart named functions that I call. It’s exactly same thing as build provider in .NET. This may be obvious to most, but that was exact moment when it all clicked in my head.
I think Rails is really cool. I think Ruby is really cool too. I like the synergy between them. I like the way working in command prompt and text editor without IntelliSense is making you think about what you type, making you think how to name stuff, so it would always make sense. I like the way it’s making you stay close to the metal, and making you stand out from other “drones”
Question is does it pay off? Are you better of without IntelliSense that is saving you a couple of keyboard clicks, but maybe stealing a lot more from you. Or you don’t have a chance in this fast paced world.
I haven’t made up my mind yet…
Posted by Kresimir Bojcic on March 4, 2009
Over the course of years I’ve been confronted with more than one integration. The worst one of all was web service based integration. That was a big surprize. At the end I had to use soap logger and pin point every little thing that went wrong including null integers which is okay in Java but not in .NET. Not to mention that I had to spoon feed web service so it would work ( things like: “only at this time of a day”, “never with that parameter”… ). It was a big messy pile of disbelief and despair. We ended up spending 200 hours on this (we’ve planned for 40 hours).
For queing we used IBM MQUE, it was a lot less pain than I thought it would be. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical at first. There is something nice about fixed length message format that is commonly used when using QUE. I can’t put my finger on it but it just feels elegant and easy to modify. We never loosed a single message in more than two years so I am more than pleased with that.
Database integration is also OK. Make sure you can repeat process, and that you deliver a meaningful error messages.
To summarize:
- Whatever your estimate is – double it
- Log,log,log – you need to cover you behind when it is time to point fingers (and you need to know what went wrong if you want to look at this from constructive point of view)
- Don’t use .xml – it’s lame standard for integration – contrary to popular belief
- Use web services only as your last resort
- For bulk integration DB is the best option
- For message integration, answer is obvious – use QUE or suffer the consequences
- For something in between even fixed delimited file beats .xml any day
- Make sure your integration is repeatable – you can bet on mistakes happening during bulk integrations, and a general need to repeat integration