Rails 3: Django with a funny syntax

From the announcements for Rails 3:

The upcoming version 3 of Ruby on Rails will feature a sexy new querying API from ActiveRecord. Here is an example:

User.order('users.id DESC').limit(20).includes(:items)

In other words, Rails is now Django.

Also:

• Each application now has it’s own name space, application is started with YourAppName.boot for example, makes interacting with other applications a lot easier.
• Rails 3.0 now provides a Rails.config object, which provides a central repository of all sorts of Rails wide configuration options.

In other words, Rails is now Django.

To be fair, these are huge improvements to Rails. They’ve needed to do these things for a long, long time. The separation of application namespaces is especially powerful– it’s what gives Django a massive chunk of it’s dynamism. It’s good to see that these great ideas, which have been in Django since version 2, have now made it into Rails, just as the Django people start grappling with their own version of Capistrano (Fabric) and their own deployment issues. Rails’ migration path has always been obvious, a pythonic value, while Django has two migration tools (South and Evolution), which is more a rubyish value, and the Django team has decided to leave migration tracks up to outside development teams may-the-best-solution-win.

So, we’ll see. I’m installing Rails 3 this morning, and who knows?  Maybe it’ll seduce me back to working with Rails again.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

A pleasant waste of my goddamn time

Yesterday, while driving to a client's site, a car in front of me threw up a rock that hit my windshield and chipped it. It wasn't a bad chip, no more than a half-centimeter across or so, but it was annoying and presented an ongoing crack risk.

I drove out this afternoon to the glass place to get it fixed, and the girl behind the counter said, "Talk to your insurance company first. They might cover it all." It was only four or five menus down (Language -> Accident claim -> First claim -> Glass claim -> On-site), not tragically horrible, and when I told the guy I was actually at the glass place with which my insurance company deals, he said, "Oh! In that case, give them this number," and he rattled off a number, "And they'll jump you to the front of the line."

It took only 25 minutes, plus 20 minutes drive time there and 20 back, so not too bad. I brought my ebook reader with me and, intent on deleting a corrupted file (the Honor Harrington collection from the disk that came with War of Honor had somehow frotzed on me), I accidentally hit "delete all read files," which includes even those I hadn't finished reading, frack! I was left with only a few really bad romances ("the curve of his turgid testicles?" Please, sister!).

Compared to many experiences I've had with bureaucracy, these people seemed earnestly interested in getting me back on the road as quickly and safely as possible.