Websphere Mordor

At my day job I have the great displeasure of working with Websphere which has to be one of the most anal app servers I have had the (dis)pleasure to work with.

What can I say. The joys of scripting in jython with wsadmin and imagining the drunken night playing with babushka dolls which must have inspired the wonders of it’s logical simple admin interface.

Enter Frodo on Rails

Ok, it is powerful, but talk about feeling in a Kafkaesque world at times. Then enters Ruby on Rails as the swift and elegant hero ready to take on the world. Boy am I having fun. I hope to release my first project built in it in January if my day job allows it.

Like everyone else I watched the video and thought cool. Then I downloaded it and ended up putting it off as I need to work with Java for both my own projects and my current day job. When the frustrations of Websphere and friends got the most of me I decided I needed a breath of fresh air to kickstart my new projects.

Ruby is cool. Ruby on Rails is cool. It really just works. Of course it fills me with silly national pride to know that it is a Danish invention as well. David the developer/evangelist is a great example of the new generation globalist geek entrepreneurs that I hope will help inspire other bright sparks here.

My idea for ActiveUser

Ruby consists of some nice modules with an Active theme going on:

• ActiveRecord is the easy to use ORM library (The M in MVC)
• ActionPack The Controller and View part of the MVC
• ActiveMailer Something as innovative useful as a simple mailing framework.

I found lots of discussion about various variations of the same login concepts. So I was thinking we should take the Dont Repeat Yourself concept and create an ActiveUser package, meant to be integrated into ActionPack. I am working on that right now and hope to have something to show shortly (work allowing).