Wasting away the moments that make up a new day

Technorati Tags: modelviewcontroller, objectactioninterface

For the last couple of days, I’ve been working on a couple of interesting things, of which the most important has been getting my resumes together, and the most interesting of which has been getting rubyonrails installed on my Macintosh.

Rails is interesting, because it handles the idea of dispatching incoming web requests in a way of which I greatly approve. I spent a lot of time in the late 90s trying to convince people that this sort of URL syntax was the right way to do things, and now through rails I’m feeling vindicatedish. Actually, I hadn’t really thought about it until I was talking to an ex-coworker who remembered me talking a lot about the Object-Action syntax being a good start on the Model-View-Controller. At the time, lot of pages named stufff like performSpecificActionOnSpecificObject.extension were more common. Anyway, this sort of thing leads itself to cleaner code design in a number of ways (including patterns, etc…) so it’s the sort of thing that generally ought to be encouraged.

I’m doing a project in Ruby at the moment mostly to get my hand back into programming. Because of the sorts of work/school I’ve been doing for the last while, I’m much much better at design and analysis than I’ve ever been, but my hacking skills are a little weaker than I recall. Learning a new language in a different paradigm is very useful, especially something that’s rich in hacky synax/generator crap like Ruby seems to be at the top level.

More specifically, I’m taking on a social networking light application. I’ve always wanted to do a social networking application, and during the job search seems like a good time.