David "Stratton" Guest wrote: > Snakes and Rubies > > This (http://tinyurl.com/hwfgv) three hour epic pits two exciting > newcomers to the small screen. Adrian Holovaty plays a tall laconic > mid-western journalist come programmer on a mission to turn static > websites into a sea of user oriented usability. Aided by Jacob > Kaplan-Moss the movie describes their journey to the small Kansas town > of Lawrence as innocents in search of fun and adventure. However, under > the veneer of small town respectability, they uncover a sea of > deception, darkness and 150,000 lines of PHP code. Their quest to > overcome this evil makes for a gripping tale and gives Holovaty a > platform on which to display his considerable talents. > > The story then shifts briefly to Denmark and on to Chicago as we follow > David Heinemeier Hanson's coming to America. He is brash, loud mouthed > and opinionated but at the same time passionate in his search for truth > and beauty. He portrays a man on a mission bent on succeeding and doing > whatever it takes in his quest for world domination, even if it means > compromising some non-core values. His initial cynical, and perhaps > sadistic, needling of java programmers' eyeballs may offend some viewers > but he sees it as just one of the necessary steps on his long journey. > Later, in scenes reminiscent of Luke Skywalker discovering his real > parentage, he strikes down Larry Wall's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. We > also see him agonise, although admittedly not for long, over the need > for keeping the code pure while at the same time allowing others with > commit rights in. Hanson shows his ability to weigh up the risks and the > dangers but with an unshakable vision he is happy to chance his hand and > take his opportunities when they arise. This is an outstanding > performance and Hanson deserves his reputation as Schwarzenegger II. > > The final third of the movie sees the two main protagonists locked in a > room full of questioning hackers in the Computer Science Department of > DePaul University, Chicago. They thrust and parry across frameworks, > through cool admin panels, automatic RSS feeds and minimising ajaxian > ugliness. However, neither is prepared to go in for the kill since the > real battle awaits each of them outside those walls. > > All in all it was an outstanding performance by these two young men and > we will surely see a lot more from each of them over the next few years. > I am personally looking forward to see how each of them grow and mature. > > I'll give the movie four stars.
But what did Margaret think of it? Note that the above movie is nearly a year old, and both Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) and especially Django have matured a lot since then. I have started to play around with RoR, Django and Turbogears a wee bit - operative word being wee - and the thing that strikes me so far is that RoR seems to be very much database driven - you define your database tables and the columns in them and the relationships between them first, then you tell RoR to go and generate a basic but working Web application from that database - basically a series of CRUD pages (pages that allow you to Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete records in tables). Then you customise and embellish these CRUD pages and their functions. In this respect it is a lot like MS-Access (which is no bad thing, as MS-Access has always been the one revolutionary bit of software which Microsoft has ever produced, although it stagnated and began to get worse with each new version after V2.0) - at least like MS-Access as it was originally, when you first had to defined tables and then the data entry forms for them (not like it is today where, like FileMaker, you can define the data entry forms and it creates tables in the background - much too magic and implicit for my liking). By contrast, Django and Turbogears require you to write some Python code to define a set of classes representing data objects in your application, and their relationships (which can be quite complex), and then they generate both the underlying databases tables and the data entry screens, which can then be embellished and enhanced. That's as far as I have got. So far, Django seems about as good as RoR in terms of how far it takes you with little effort - maybe RoR is slightly ahead. Turbogears definitely needs more effort up front (but that may have pay-offs later). I personally prefer the Django and Turbogears approaches of defining classes for data objects, rather than flat or relational database tables - it seems like a more modern and flexible. The real test will be embellishing the generated scaffolding code - and that is to come as time permits. Apologies in advance, Horst, for spreading more FUD... Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
