Well, where to start.
I haven’t blogged in a bit, and I hope to get back in the swing of things here shortly now that I am working with Ruby again. See I got a new job working in a complete Microsoft Stack. SQL Server Management Studio owns, SSIS sucks, and then your left with .NET and IIS (I mainly do Backend work, so I can’t comment on this), but at least they are working on .NET MVC and have a niche community brewing over at ALT.NET. I have been enjoying their discussions as I commute to my new job, Thanks guys.
Luckily I have been able to sneak some Ruby into my work place, for a lot of backend automated processes. Since I can’t use ActiveRecord with these legacy databases, and Datamapper doesn’t really support Windows, I have been working on my own little “get the job done” Object Relational Mapper. Meta-programming is a freaking blast, and thank God(science Robby?) for the One Click installer including the DBI class. Also, ODBC is way underrated in my opinion. I will throw the code up on github as soon as I get it to a semi-stable releasable state. Think Database to Database imports(with conversions) and Faker data stubbing, all defined in the model.
So… Rails and Merb Merged (Mails? or Rerb?), leaving me very shocked, confused, angry, then eventually happy. Shocked because it happened after all the drama; confused cause I wasn’t sure about the seriousness of this happening; angry cause this blog is run using merb and I really liked the idea behind it; and finally came to a state of serenity. This IS going to be for the best. The idea of taking two of the most innovative and efficient development groups (Rails and Merb respectfully) we are really going to get the #1 web development framework in the mix of all of it. Unfortunately its probably not going to come for another 6 months to a year.
So I guess instead of trying to learn Merb, I’m going to go back to working with Rails, but this time I am going to try and use DataMapper and jQuery, instead of ActiveRecord and Prototype. My roomate Ralph has been working on trying to make a plug to use the rails helpers and jQuery unobtrusively. He hopes to release something in the future.
I’ve got ShovelChat up and running again. I am going to try and work on that a bit, as well as add some more to ChatSandbox.
Now, back to the Laboratory…
Curious, but why can't you use AR for legacy databases? I've also been sneaking Ruby in the backdoor at my job, and I've successfully used AR with our legacy db. You have the specify table names and key columns (and if your db obeys a different but consistent convention, you can handle this in a DRY manner), but it's a small price to pay for some AR goodness.
Yah, I really just couldn't get much of AR to work with MS SQL on Windows. We ended up reworking a lot of everything in C#. Its been interesting to say the least, Castle ActiveRecord is pretty cool. I have really been enjoying learning a new language, and really look forward to C# 4.0. You can really see the influence of Ruby coming into the .NET community.