Hang Ten

GoRuCo Rocked

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

First, for those of you who haven’t heard, I’ve left AT&T Interactive and am now with new startup, SharesPost.com. (Launch is coming soon.) And, no, it isn’t running on Waves. At least, not yet. More on this momentarily.

Second, some thoughts on the recent GoRuCo, held at Pace University in Manhattan … to begin with, awesome. That is how you do it. I haven’t been to all the regional RubyConfs, but I’ve been to several, as well as the national conference, and many smaller non-Ruby conferences. They all tend to suffer from one common malady: too many talks and too little socializing. Furthermore, there just aren’t enough women involved. I realize this has become topical lately, but I’ve always thought the imbalance in the technical world (not just Ruby Nation) was ridiculous.

REST FTW, Part 3

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I suggested thinking about REST and ROA in the context of an object-based platform and protocol neutral approach to distributed computing. The "objects" are the specific representations (MP3, JSON, HTML) of a resource. The semantics of a resource itself are intentionally vague because you never interact with them directly, at least from the standpoint of ROA. This ensures that the "platform neutral" part of the bargain is never compromised.

REST FTW, Part 2

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

REST is not an architecture, but a set of constraints for an architecture. I like to use the phrase Resource-Oriented Architecture to talk about the specific Web-based architecture that satisfies those constraints. But the main thing to remember is that these are constraints for a bandwidth-optimizing object-based distributed computing architecture that is both platform and protocol neutral. In that light, one thing that should be clear is that REST therefore applies to pretty much everything Web developers do these days.

REST FTW, Part 1

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, in my talks on Waves and how it supports RESTful architectures, I've found I've had to take a step back and talk more about what REST is and why it matters.

This is a bit surprising, since REST has been on the buzzword bingo card for years now. However, it turns out that most of what has passed for RESTful is really what I have come to call REST-lite. Essentially, REST-lite focused on the verbs of the HTTP protocol and (more or less) ignores ... well, the rest.

Speaking At GoRuCo

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be speaking on Waves at GoRuCo in The Big Apple (specifically, Pace University in Lower Manhattan) on May 31st. I love Manhattan (or, at least, I love visiting there) and I really enjoy these smaller conferences. I wanted to speak at last year’s GoRuCo but narrowly missed the deadline because I had been completely immersed in getting the first version of Waves out the door.

LA RubyConf Kills It

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The inaugural LA RubyConf was a bit hit. I am proud to have kicked things off as the first speaker, given the line-up that followed, which included cats and dogs living together, flying robots, cloud comedy and a unified theory of hacking.

When Waves Grows Up

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I get a number of questions along the lines of, “Why shouldn’t I just use Rails or Merb? How is Waves better than Rails?” and so forth. The thing is, Waves is not “a better Rails” — Rails does a great job for database-driven Web apps and Merb provides a nice target for “Rails 3”. Waves is trying to solve a different problem entirely.

Waves Rumors

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

No big news, but I thought someone needed to update the blog, since we have been hard at work hacking Waves. Luckily the commits always tell the truth, which is that there are interesting new features coming out with the (imminent) 0.83 release of Waves.

Waves Begins The New Year

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You can watch my RubyConf presentation now, or just go through the slides to better understand what we’re doing here.

We’re Now AT&T Interactive

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is a little bit late, but I wanted to let everybody know that we’re now AT&T Interactive. Our work today encompasses everything from voice recognition to social networking. We’ve recently hired Chris Hughes (not that one, this one), Ari Lerner, and Eero Saynatkari, along with many other talented folks.

Waves 0.8.1

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This is mostly a stablization release from the big 0.8.0 release last week. The big improvement is actually the docs, most of which are on this Web site.

Why Resource-Oriented Matters

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Waves 0.8.0

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So what have we been up to? The biggest change is that the overall focus has shifted from Sun MVC with support for alternative approaches to being much more resource-oriented and architecturally focused. Sun MVC is now basically one way to use Waves, but there is nothing special about it.

Speaking At RubyConf

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I am very excited to be speaking at RubyConf ‘08. It is sold out, but if you’re going, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. If you’re not, I will be posting the slides here and of course Confreaks is recording the sessions.

Waves 0.7.7 (Briareus)

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

More good news: we now have version 0.7.7 (Briareus) available as a gem. Kudos to Matthew King, who did the bulk of the work on this release (and the last one, which happened so quickly, I never even got a chance to blog about it). This makes three releases in the past month, somewhat making up for the long stretch between 0.7.3 and the next really meaningful release, 0.7.5. Not only that, but we have our new resource-oriented mappings in edge, just waiting to find their way into the world. So you can continue to expect us to keep the pace.

Waves 0.7.5 (Janus)

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Waves is an open source framework for building web applications in Ruby, built from a smashing combination of mapping lambdas for request routing and just-in-time resources for request processing. Waves doesn’t care which ORM, template renderer, or Rack handler you use. Waves is thread-safe when you want it to be.

Speaking At LoneStar RubyConf And Other News

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Good news! I’ve been selected to speak at the LoneStar RubyConf in Austin, TX, September 4-6, 2008 on Resource-oriented Web apps using Waves. This will be perfect timing as we expect to have our entire Resource-driven, Layers-based goodness ready for show (also known as the Turtles All The Way Down release). Hope to see you there!

Dan Signs On With YPC

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As many of you may already know, YPC is one of the largest (if not the largest) Ruby / Rails deployments in the world. YPC SRD is thus one of the few places where you can work with Ruby on innovative and exciting projects. We are also hiring, so if this sounds interesting, and you’d like to be able to work with technologies like Waves, hit me up.

We’ve Gone Git!

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve joined the cool kids and gone all git, so if you’ve been using the SVN repo, stop, drop, and roll. If you have questions about how to use Git or transition from SVN to Git, please stop by the forum, and we’ll do our best to help!

Waves Featured On InfoQ / RubyInside

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that happened. On consecutive days, Waves was featured on two popular Ruby blogs, InfoQ and Peter Cooper’s RubyInside. It was fantastic exposure and a great way to cap of Waves’ first month since it’s public launch.

Just In Time Resources And Why They Matter

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things I always found myself doing in Rails was refactoring my models and controllers so that I could create new ones by simply inheriting from an appropriate base class and then maybe add a few tweaks and be finished. I typically ended up with three or four base classes representing different types of resources. For example, I might have one for administrative-related controllers, another for content-delivery related controllers, and so on.

Matz Blogs About Waves!

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I am probably way more excited about this than I should be, but I don’t care. Matz has a blog entry about Waves!

More About Request Lambdas

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I got into a bit of discussion about the concept of request mappings on the mailing list, so I thought I’d recap that here as my first attempt to look at the nuts and bolts of Waves. Request mappings are akin to routes in Rails or Merb. But there are some profound differences. Request mappings are exactly that – they map a request to a block of code.

Waves Goes To Beta

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s taken a bit longer than I’d hoped, but Waves is finally at beta status, ready to find its way out in the world.

Final Alpha Release

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The last alpha release, last chance for feedback before the public beta release.