Ruby on Rails productivity

I was always amazed by the productivity of ruby language. Specially by the development infrastructure of rails. I wanted to check it and specially to measure it.

Therefore, I decided to implement something which was already implemented in other languages before using other infrastructure. This happens in our industry very rarely.

I started to implement the payroll system described in the book Agile Software Development. Originally the payroll system was written in C++ and consist of about 3300 LOC. I implemented the first iteration in ruby writing only 383 LOC including even the test code. I was very surprised. :)

And why did I use rails? Ruby would have been enough.

Simply because it has a very effective development environment.

I used migrate files for creating the relational DB, fixtures for setting up the preconditions for testing, zentest as devil's advocate, and rake for a lot.

What about the benefits:

• it was fun, easy, and very interactive
• I've got fast feedback from zentest
• all the O/R mapping was already done
• learned a lot along the journey
• During the development I was happiest ever

Keep smiling :)

World of Standards

I saw an interesting post in my feed reader today about the fact that the IE8 passes the Acid2 test.

I ran the test myself immediately using my installed browsers. I was surprised that firefox didn't pass the test but I was very happy that Safari and Webkit both passed.

The whole test is just about displaying a simple smily face correctly, isn't it?

Taking a closer look what is inside the test I was surprised how many small details are tested.

They also test some seldom used great css features like the generated content, css tables, child selectorsto name just a few one.

The guys there simply made a brilliant job for the web community.

I am anxious to try the next Acid test. :)