David Bolton Strikes Again

I’ve often found the scriptaculous docs to be rather lacking (the jQuery docs tend to be much better for instance), and today I ran into another issue.  While the docs for Ajax.Autocompleter do mention the callback method, it wasn’t really clear till I came across a great post by Nicholas Schlueter on dynamic parameters for Ajax.Autocompleter.  Combined with a handy bit of javascript from my buddy Rex Chung for getting radio group values and I had a solution to my problem (of how to return parameters in my AJAX request with dynamic data from user input into a radio group)

Only one question remains: why the hell is the method named “callback”?  When considering what callback normally means in the context of AJAX implementations, it’s an astoundingly poor choice.

Anyway, thanks Rex, thanks Nicholas.

Seems ThoughtWorks is up to it again, this time with Oracle: they’ve made a social networking application for Oracle’s customers, using jRuby and Rails.

I’m overjoyed that these enterprise applications are emerging, with big company support.  I have been “agitating” the idea of Ruby and Rails in the enterprise for the last eighteen months but have always met resistance in the Australian market.  The larger companies here are very risk averse and haven’t been able to grasp the value of a rapid development environment with strong test driven development underpinnings, but as these forward thinking organisations such as ThoughtWorks and Oracle demonstrate, there are great opportunities to be had.

Can you believe they took only 5 weeks to build this app!  I can, but then again I use Rails every day.

Last night I presented at the Ruby on Rails Oceania Sydney meetup for November on the topic of Netbeans as a Ruby / Rails IDE. There was a good turnout, with my guesstimate that we had between 30 and 40 people show up.

This talk was mostly based on my experiences with Netbeans over the last six months, since it has been rapidly evolving. Between my own experiences and inspiration from Tor Norbye’s excellent weblog I had enough material for over 30min.

Unfortunately, as before, no slides to show, as I tend to talk to topic headings, meaning the slides I have are generally one or two words each, and are useless without the talk, and unfortunately Lachie wasn’t around to screencast it. Maybe finally next time I’ll be screencast!

While I expected I’d get quite a bit of resistance for suggesting something other than TextMate, but there was some genuine interest and good discussion. Thanks everyone!