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Music without DRM… from the record labels? Maybe: Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music - New York Times

Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of MadTV. I just found it a little too heavy-handed to enjoy the humor.

This is pretty good, though:

This article, Code Generation: The Real Lesson of Rails, sums up some of the thoughts I’ve had over the past few days of investigating Ruby on Rails.

It isn’t that Ruby is a better programming language than any other (though it is nice) or that Rails is a better framework.

It’s that Rails is as much, or more, about code generation than it is about just “being a framework.

I spent a while working with Fusebox while I was coding Coldfusion a couple years back. When I think of a “framework”, Fusebox is what comes to mind. Fusebox is a nice paradigm for building applications. Like Rails (and like possible most or all web application frameworks), Fusebox uses the Model-View-Controller design pattern (hereafter, MVC). It has some nifty xml files, some pre-built CFML, and some handy suggestions for organizing your code. It’s a framework, and if you want to work with Coldfusion, I still think it’s a pretty good one.

Having this in mind, I think simply calling Rails a “framework” is selling it a little short.

Rails is a framework, sure, but it’s also a set of command-line scripts that will generate code for you. Potentially, lots of code. Code that works.

Again, as a disclaimer, I’m not at all saying that Rails is the be-all-end-all of web development, nor that the other languages and frameworks don’t have something great to offer. I’m looking forward to checking many others out, in time.

In the meantime, I have to say: Rails is awesome.

If you’ve ever heard more than a few tidbits about Second Life… then Get a First Life will probably amuse you.

Rails

I’m finally dipping my toes into the murky waters that are Ruby on Rails. I’m too early into the project to make even the most rudimentary comments about it, other than the fact that I’ll be trying it out. I need to create an application for my Software Design class, and we have complete discretion to use whichever object oriented programming language we like… so, I figured I’d try out Ruby, using Rails simply because it seems like an easy way to put the application online, where it can be easily demoed, easily accessible. Also, I have a domain I’m using that has the capability of using Ruby on Rails… so, why not?

All that just to say… well, nothing about Rails, really. It was pretty easy to set up, and looks interesting. I have not used many frameworks, so there’s not much I can compare it to, but I’m looking forward to learning about it.

Groovy

This isn’t new, but it’s new to me: there’s a programming language for the Java platform called Groovy. From the Groovy website:

An agile dynamic language for the Java Platform with many features that are inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk, making them available to Java developers using a Java-like syntax.

I don’t know when or how I’ll ever have the time to look closer at that, but it’s now on my list; sounds interesting. There is even a port of Rails for Groovy, known as Grails. Cool.