Shebanator » Dynamic Languages

Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing

Andrew Shebanow — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 05:16:05 +0000

I recently installed CruiseControl.rb on my MacBook Pro, and its been a great help. But I’ve also been looking at “Continuous Testing” tools like the autotest feature of ZenTest. I don’t find autotest to be a great fit for my laptop – it kills battery life if I forget to turn it off, and it makes the machine hot even when I’m plugged in.

I’m curious: what do other people do for Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Testing on their small team projects? What are the gotchas? Any wish lists?

Mozilla TraceMonkey speeds javascript

Andrew Shebanow — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:18:21 +0000

I think it is very cool how much progress is being made on Javascript performance in both Firefox and Safari – very exciting times. It will be interesting to see if/how/when Microsoft can step up to the bar.

It’s also cool how the Mozilla/Firefox effort was fueled in part by the donation of Tamarin and Tamarin Tracing to Mozilla. I hope this collaboration can continue to be productive.

Steve Yegge on dynamic language optimization

Andrew Shebanow — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:27:04 +0000

I’ve been underwater trying to get a release out the door ever since I got back from Germany two weeks ago, and so haven’t had much time to do anything interesting. But last night I read a fantastic transcript of a talk by Steve Yegge of Google called Dynamic Languages Strike Back. If you care about compilers and/or dynamic languages you should read it and check out some of the linked articles, including one from Adobe. Mind-blowing stuff.

History Meme

Andrew Shebanow — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:12:22 +0000

Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim have done it, so I thought I’d throw my command line history into the mix. Interestingly, I’ve been doing a lot of ruby on rails work over the last few weeks and it has skewed my command line use away from java based stuff like ant and maven:

~ % history | awk '{a[$3]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}' | sort -rn | head 259 ls 135 cd 82 p4 61 svn 61 ruby 59 cap 34 rm 31 mate 30 rake 22 script/console

(and, in case anyone was wondering why I use the third column instead of the second, it is because my default shell is still tcsh.)

Adobe’s Christmas Present for Mobile Developers

Andrew Shebanow — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 23:34:08 +0000

Tamarin-Tracing: Open source ActionScript3 VM for mobile platforms, contributed to Mozilla’s Tamarin Project. Written in Forth! I personally can’t wait to bring our Flex3 apps down to the mobile platform…

[Update 12-19-2007: fixed name of technology. thanks for the correction.]

Mozilla Monkeying Around with Tamarin

Andrew Shebanow — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:53:56 +0000

But in a really good way. Brendan Eich has announced 3 cool new projects around the Tamarin engine Adobe contributed to the Mozilla project:

ActionMonkey, which will merge SpiderMonkey and Tamarin. Not really a new project, but lots more details are available.
ScreamingMonkey, which will allow Tamarin to be invoked from within IE. Not clear to me whether this is really Tamarin or ActionMonkey that gets integrated. Is it “just” Tamarin’s ECMAScript engine, or is there more?
IronMonkey, which is an effort to port IronPython and IronRuby to run on Tamarin.

Several people have wrote about this already, most notably Sam Ruby, Dion Almaer of Ajaxian.com, and Adobe’s own John Dowdell.

These are all very cool projects. Being able to use a modern, high performance ECMAScript engine within IE could be huge. I wonder if this will embarrass the IE folks into updating their ancient JavaScript engine?

But the project I’m most interested in is IronMonkey. I even talked about wanting such a thing way back in November 2006 in a comment on Sam Ruby’s blog:

Yes, a Ruby or Python environment that generated AVM2 bytecodes would be awesome as part of Firefox etc. No more need for things like RJS – just write your entire web app in Rails, using HTML and/or Flash for presentation.

It is interesting that Mozilla chose to use IronPython and IronRuby as the basis for this work, though. I have a lot of respect for Jim Huginin and company, but using the Microsoft languages means a lot of hassles:

since the languages are written in C#, they have to use Mono to compile the compilers. Not a big deal, but yet another dependency to manage.
although MsPL is a pretty open license, I don’t think the actual source repositories for the compilers allow contributions from anyone other than Microsoft employees. Thus Mozilla is going to have to make a downstream repository and deal with all the version skew issues. Be interesting to see if Microsoft fixes this problem eventually. I hope so. If they don’t they are missing out on a key benefit of open source.

Would have preferred them to use JRuby and Jython as the base, personally. Still, I applaud the Mozilla folks for coming up with such a compelling vision for JavaScript’s future, and look forward to the day when I can write AJAX apps using Ruby on the client.

Origins of LINQ and the WinFS Black Hole

Andrew Shebanow — Thu, 31 May 2007 22:21:11 +0000

A fascinating blog posting from Matt Warrer of Microsoft on the origins of LINQ and how the technology escaped the black hole of WinFS:

Why didn’t I start with WinFS? After all, it was all the rage inside the SQL Server org at the time. Unfortunately, it was the same story as with ObjectSpaces. They were shipping before us. We weren’t on their radar. Their hubris was bigger than ours. Not to mention my belief that WinFS was the biggest fiasco I’d ever bore witness to, but that’s another story.

Yet, part of that story was the impetus to turn LINQ to SQL into an actual product.

Way back when I attended a multi-day WinFS event put on by Microsoft. When I got back to Adobe I wrote a rather scathing report on the technology, and predicted it wouldn’t ship in Longhorn. It was a somewhat controversial report at the time, and I was greatly relieved when my prediction came true. Its nice to see that there were folks within Microsoft who felt the same…

Tip of the hat to Erwyn van der Meer for the original link.

Fowler on Microsoft and IronRuby

Andrew Shebanow — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:12:20 +0000

Martin Fowler has written a very interesting post on Microsoft, alpha geeks, and IronRuby. It is well worth a read. Quote of note:

My colleague John Kordyback pointed out that at the heart of all this is realizing that Ruby is not Yet Another .NET Language but a whole community and attitude to software development. Ruby is a community where open source, agile thinking, and lightweight solutions are deeply ingrained values. He says a common problem in Redmond is that “They ask me ‘Why is this language important’ rather than ‘Why is this thinking important?’”

Off to RailsConf

Andrew Shebanow — Wed, 16 May 2007 17:04:00 +0000

I was going to attend last year but had to cancel at the last minute – such a bummer. But that just makes me more excited that i’m going this year. You can see what sessions I plan to attend here.

I’d also like to put in the plug for the two sessions involving Adobe folks. There is some cool stuff going on:

Get in touch with me using my last name @adobe.com if you’d like to get together. I’m also looking for a technical lead who has experience building high volume web infrastructure, working out of SF, San Jose, or Seattle (in order of preference), so let me know if you are that person or if you know someone who is…

More on Twitter, Rails, and Scaling

Andrew Shebanow — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:45:29 +0000

Just a brief update to point to some more good discussion on the issues with scaling Twitter to handle its load better, as discussed in my earlier post on Friction(less) Rails. The first thing I wanted to point out is that a lot of people have called Twitter’s purported load into question. The original source for the 11,000 requests/second number was DHH’s original post as far as I can tell. That’s a heck of a lot of load, and as others have pointed out, its a nice problem to have. Jens Alfke of Apple has written a nice post describing the problem and ways to handle it that do not involve databases. Its an interesting read, and the comments are worth a look as well.

Another article worth reading is by Peter Bell. In it, he reflects on the tone of the conversation to date and thinks about the appropriateness of Rails for the applications it is being used for. I don’t actually agree with him but its an interesting point of view:

Simple apps with huge traffic requirements needs different engineering choices that complex enterprise apps that may have lower loads but higher complexities and maintenance burdens. When I look at an app like twitter (which is when it comes down to it, a submit form, a list display and an API along with some really interesting scaling challenges) I’m not sure Ruby or Rails would be the ideal tools. I’m not sure what language has the very best support for the highest and most robust levels of performance and scalability, but I’m guessing whatever it is would be the perfect choice – even if it meant it took you a week instead of a day to code the form, the API and the list (I know it is a little more than that, but I think we all know it doesn’t need to be TOO much more than that – it isn’t exactly an insurance quoting app or something).

As with anything cool and new (remember when Java was the *it* language?!) Ruby and Rails are being widely misused. I am not convinced that all of the Web 2.0 start ups selecting Ruby have picked the bet tool – they’ve picked the coolest one. However, cool tools bring the smartest programmers so it still may be a smart decision – even if the language and framework has problems, at least choosing them means you can more easily get the most innovative programmers to work on your problems, and just like in Venture Capital where a good team trumps a good idea, in programming a good coder trumps a good language.

Once again, I want to commend people for turning the conversation in a more positive direction. Its been a great read.