Software Development & Beyond

I just completed a great training course for Ruby On Rails (RoR), a revolutionary framework for web developing. The course was in Boston (MA) and was held by the authors of the notable book Agile Web Development with Rails.

I personally have quite some experience with ‘traditional’ web development using ASP.NET and J2EE. Having experimented with RoR myself and gone through additional training, I can now say for sure that RoR is definitely easier and more productive than these (and at the same time making it easy to get great quality and maintainability). RoR also compares very favourably against PHP according to the many PHP developers I meet during the course.

According to the guys behind the Rails Studio training course for Ruby On Rails: “Nothing says ‘I’m ready to write killer Rails apps’ better than a Rails Studio alumni button”. So here is the button I got:

For good or bad partial classes in C# 2.0 allows breaking of encapsulation as this example will show.

In a consulting job I recently ran into an interesting case involving a webservice with several different service methods f1, f2, fn (sample names, not actual names) all taking the same string argument and all returning a string. The user would select an operation name after which my code had to call the named operation on a web service using a standard parameter. Trivial really, if one would do accept bad code like this below, but I don’t:

String operationName = …
String arg = …
Webserviceproxy webserviceproxy = …
// Warning: Badly coupled code begins here (need to update each time we add/rename/delete operations).
switch (operationName) {
case “f1″: return webserviceproxy.f1(arg); break;
case “f2″: return webserviceproxy.f2(arg); break;
}

What is really needed is a method to invoke a webservice method by name, while still using the generated .NET proxy to do the hard soap/http stuff (no time to reinvent a better wheel here).

Let’s look at an extract of the generated proxy:

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