A company called GemStone Systems, who's focus is enterprise and performance, has a teaser site that's got a few people talking...

Ruby that scales™

http://ruby.gemstone.com/

What are they up to over there? Not sure yet, guess we'll have to wait for RubyConf '08... but it could be interesting.

I recently took a look at some simple benchmarks for a JRuby on Rails application... just to see where things stand. The results were not all that surprising.

While JRuby performs well against Ruby 1.8.6 in straight benchmarks, the Rails performance is still lagging a bit. But things are getting better.

For technology enthusiasts living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area there is never a shortage of interesting technical and networking events to attend. Most IT professionals in the area are aware of the larger organizations (NOVAJUG) and events (NFJS), but if you’re looking for something a little more specific, one great resource to use is the D.C. Tech Events Calendar.

I get it, I just don't want it.

My current project requires the generation of PDF reports in a web-based J2EE app, using free tools. Everyone knows about Jasper and iText, but our requirements are for a small number of somewhat simple reports, so I thought those would be overkill. Not to mention the fact that my preference is to use presentation technology that is familiar without any custom coding.

I'm hearing the phrase User Experience thrown around quite a bit these days. It's become an overloaded term that means different things to different folks, yet we all seem to agree with the premise that a positive user experience is essential.

Overriding the toString() method is an all too common Java developer experience. It’s also somewhat tedious: Write out the class name… write out some properties and their values… format it so it doesn’t look hideous… repeat for lots of other classes.

Wouldn't it be better if there were an automatic way to generate decent looking toString() methods?

Apache to the rescue!

So, I was going through a stack of podcasts that had piled up. One of them was an interview with Zed Shaw (creator of Mongrel) at http://ajaxian.com/podcast/. He pontificates about a number of things. It's an hour long, but of particular interest to me was when he was talking about the old Rails-In-The-Enterprise debate. He mentioned three key barriers to Rails in this area:
1. EAI (i.e. interfacing w/ legacy apps, arcane data sources, etc)
2. Authentication (very limited support now)
3. a Rails stack with good management tools (the JBoss or Websphere of Rails, as he puts it)

Platinum Solutions Delivery Methodology (PSDM) defines the standard processes, templates, and guidelines utilized on Platinum Solutions software development projects. This methodology is based upon years of successful project delivery and industry best practices, and promotes efficient, reliable, and predictable projects. PSDM provides project team members easy access to processes, templates, and samples which can be tailored to fit individual project needs.