Rails’ Unusual Architecture
There has been surprisingly little written about how Rails is implemented If you Google for "architecture Rails" you'll find plenty of articles that describe Rails as a web...
Recent posts
If Only I Could Read Japanese
How neat, Matz linked to my article about fixing architecture flaws in ActiveRecord Of course I was curious to see what he said, so I ran his comments through online...
Making Rails Better – Error Handling
Error handling in web applications is devilishly complex - we ended up rewriting SIAS's error handling code in almost every release There are two main sources of complexity...
Resources and Representations Redux
In response to my post about why it's so hard for developers to understand REST, Alex Bunardzic talks about the importance of distinguishing resources and representations I...
Why Is REST So Hard to Understand?
I know, I know Not another article about REST - hasn't this horse been flogged enough Perhaps - but recently I've been watching the GIS industry finally discover REST and...
Making Rails Better – Fixing Architecture Flaws in Active Record
ActiveRecord is a funny thing On the outside it looks great - it neatly maps relational data to Ruby objects and provides an easy to use API via its domain specific language But...
Making Rails Better – Content Negotiation
Over a year ago, I released a Rails 10 plugin that added support for content negotiation Conceptually it was simple - map the HTTP Accept header to template extensions For...
On Writing and Programming
I was planning to write about the blub paradox, a term coined by Paul Graham in an essay that argued that programmers can't conceptualize programming languages more powerful...
Ex-Smallworld Bloggers – Brian and Robert Join the Fun
Its fun watching your friends start blogging I've written a few times about the work I did at GE/Smallworld developing the Smallworld Internet Application Server (SIAS) We...
End the Endpoint Madness
Sean's been writing about why the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards aren't RESTful Since the OGC seems to be my favorite punching bag these days, I thought I'd jump...