Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession.
Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means. We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours. The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated profiling every build.
Software engineers have to be good at identifying the bottleneck, and over the past few days I saw how the larger teams ability to react mattered much more then the codebase itself....
I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright”
The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling.
What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’....
A coworker whipped up a generic REST interface for any Ruby on Rails activerecord (data model). What he described (in 5 minutes) was a nice implementation. I wanted see how the generic django REST interface was coded.
http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/
I was pleasantly surprised to realize that they Python developers simply used the normal form processing to handle rest and didn’t invent a new paradigm.
On an early project we tried to implement RESTlet for a java based REST application....
Today at work our main Flash developer asked me about expanding his skills and learning either Ruby or Python. My personal preference is towards python but ruby has its place. Flash is really doing well in the Java/Enterprise space lately so I went that way.
Most of the Flash backend in our work is xml based so XML was on my mind anyway. Recently we needed to mock up a xml data data file for a project while the real APIs are being completed....