Tal Ben-Shahar writes the following in “Happier”, his introductory book into the field of positive psychology: “The proper role of goals is to liberate us, so we can focus on the here and now.” In order to help us have a fulfilling life, our activities should both be meaningful and pleasurable. In this sense, meaning means to have a long term goal, pleasurable means to have a short term goal.

The code I write in Ruby is higher quality than the code I write in Java. Why? Because the language supports better abstractions. It lets me express a problem once, and reuse it many places. The strength of an environment comes from the quality of the libraries, and the qualities of the libraries comes from the features of the language. In this post, I will review a proposal to make Java a better language: First-Class Methods.

It’s been a year since my project replaced IBM WebSphere Application Server with a Java SE solution embedding Jetty. Looking back on the last year, I only have one regret: That it took us so long to make the switch. The difference takes a bit of perception: Our software no longer eats away our time, killing us with a thousand pinpricks. But WebSphere is just the most blatant example of software that gives you nothing, gets in the way of a lean process stream, yet costs a lot of dough.

If you though getting started with Rails seemed easy from my first post, you haven’t tried out Heroku yet. Heroku is a hosted solution for Rails that comes with a browser based IDE. There’s nothing to install. It is so easy that it’s almost ridiculous. To me, this is the future of application hosting. One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly.

This is the fourth article in my introduction to Rails. In the previous articles, we created a web application that let us edit articles, added support for comments to our articles, and added some nice AJAX effects. But a real blog needs feeds, a decent front page and some article formatting. In this article we will add all these. The article contains no groundbreaking features, but mostly dots a few i’s and crosses a few t’s both when it comes to the blog we’re building, and details in Rails.

Whenever I talk about Agile Software Development with people who have a strategic point of view, a very pertinent question always comes up: What about fixed price projects? Establishing an initial relationship with a customer about creating a product is often perceived as a weakness of Agile methods. After being asked the question very many times, I’ve started giving a fairly standard response, which is basically the same as Tom Gilb gave me when I asked him: Make the bid together with the first iteration of finished software.

In my previous articles, I showed you how to get started using Rails, and how to create model objects that are associated with each other. In this article, we will clean up the way that information is displayed and add support for dynamic HTML, or as the cool kids are calling it these days, AJAX. A view to die for First, clean up app/views/articles/show.hml.erb. I am assuming you know enough HTML to be able to make it look reasonably blog like.

Mary Poppendieck has just published a presentation on Agile software development entering the mainstream (and how to fail with agile). The presentation contains a number of insightful key points, but one footnote struck a chord with me: According to Allen Ward’s “Lean Product and Process Development”, Handsoffs are the biggest waste of product development. This has long been a pet peeve of mine, and I want to examine why handoffs occur, why they are expensive and how to avoid them.

In my last article, I showed you how to get started with your Rails application. The result of the simple commands, rails blogdemo; cd blogdemo; ruby script/generate scaffold article title:string author:string content:text; rake db:migrate; ruby script/server was that you had your own simple blog up and running. The blog support articles each of which have a title, an author, and text content. This initial model was generated for us with no editing on our part.

I am planning to write a series of articles on how to get started with Ruby on Rails. One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly. Here is what you need to do to get your first application up and running. Before you start, you need to install Ruby on Rails: On Macs, Rails is already available and you can type the following commands in a normal terminal window.