We were looking at the engines plugin for a while and despite all the flame wars around it, Me and Raphael were somewhat convinced that it would be needed somehow in future. I kept trying installing it but failed. So a little context here, we ported our application from Rails 1.2 to Rails 2.02. And it was this version which we "freezed" under the vendor directory. And installing engines plugin on that version was failing. From my past development experiences, and from observing some colleagues for a while in my career, I've a nature of being very lean and mean about things.

Hello World! Well its not the usual hello world program but some blog entries might also start with this phrase! And if in doubt, this entry is the proof! We are working on MyOwnDB that's obvious! But title says YourOwnDB? No we are not renaming it at all, rather its to convey that if it is in your own lingo, its more yours! So actually I'm talking about the localization. I'd not rephrase all about the importance of localization of software especially if its the one like MyOwnDB. When we started with MyOwnDB, it was Rails 1.2 and there was no suitable localization solution around.

Today we migrated the myowndb application to new hardware. This change brings multiple benefits. One of them is that the server hosting the app until now was getting old. MyOwnDB was started more than 2 years ago now, and has been running on the same server since the launch. Although it's a good indication that you don't need high-end hardware to run this app, more recent hardware will let us improve performance, and bring more CPU intensive features. Another benefit is that with the migration, we took the opportunity to streamline the deployment of new versions.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, launched a call for action concerning freedom and privacy in the cloud.

Hi all! Yes! MyOwnDB is not dead. It doesn't even smell funny. While it has been quiet here for some time, in the background a lot of work has been done by an expanded development team. Two important milestones will be reached soon

1. Dedomenon, the core of MyOwnDB, gets a complete REST API making it the easiest web database to use in your mashups
2. we are so proud of our code that in a couple of weeks we will release it in it's full glory under the Affero GPLv3 license. Now you can be absolutely sure your data will never be captured.

Enjoy!

I recently had the opportunity to use YUI-Ext for a little application. I'll focus on the creation of the context menus for the grid. If you're discovering YUI-Ext's layout approach, more information is available from Jack Slockum's blog in Exploring Cross-browser Web 2.0 Layouts with Yahoo!

In your tests, you can easily access variables defined in your templates as:

@response.template_objects["key"]

and here's a concrete example:

assert(@response.template_objects["user"].errors.invalid?("password")

As I was looking to upgrade applications to rails 1.2, I wrote down all changes I had to do, and post those here in the hope it can be useful to anyone. I have skipped rails 1.1 for some apps and upgraded from rails 1.0, so some (all?) of the points could be from differences between rails 1.0 and 1.1. The first thing is that apparently the name of model classes have to be named very precisely, and there's now a check to see the class was loaded correctly. This caused a problem for the class I had defined in the file app/model/user2address.rb.

After looking Douglas Crockford's talks about javascript, I started experimenting to really understand javascript's prototype. If you have downloaded the presentation's slides, this is an illustration of slide 27. I've worked with the javascript interpreter included in the JDK6, based on Rhino. If you do this, just run $JAVA_HOME/bin/jrunscript and you get a prompt of the javascript interpreter. Each javascript function is given a prototype member when it is created.

Until now I've been using javascript as a simple language to get Ajax features, but as I used it I discovered interesting features and got really interested to know more. As the JDK 6 has rhino included, you can also use javascript and get access too all Java libraries, which makes javascript knowledge even more interesting. A really great resource to know more about the power of javascript and how to use it effectively is the series of presentations by Douglas Crockford made available online by Yahoo.