PragDave

Java Rules!

Preview Goodness

Having noted some problems with Tiger’s Preview application in a previous note, it’s time to redress the balance. Preview under Tiger has got some great features. Some have been available in Acrobat reader for a while, but in Preview I get to use them faster!

• The automatic resize option resizes the PDF pages as I change the size of Preview’s window (just like Acrobat reader). No more guessing as I resize and hit zoom to fit.
• Preview now sports two side-by side views: one is two-up, the other emulates a book, ensuring recto pages actually appear on the right. This is critical for doing the layout work for a book.
• The Revert option on the file menu is presumably intended to undo bad changes you’ve made to a file. But is has a great side effect: if you’re looking at a PDF in Preview and update it on disk, hitting Revert loads the new PDF. No more closing and reopening to see the results of an edit.
• Slideshow mode makes the most of screen real estate on the Powerbook. It’s too early to say, but it looks like this could be very useful for reading.

And that’s just the changes I’ve been using while working on the layout for Chad's new book. So thanks to the team at Apple for adding stuff from my wish list. (And if you’re listening, Preview team, I’d really love an overlay-revisions mode, where I could put pages from revisions of a document on top of each other…)

Preview Problems

We’re hearing some isolated reports that Preview on OSX sometimes does strange things with the Rails book PDF. Two people have reported that our italic code font is invisible. One person reports that the navigation panel doesn’t show the chapters and sections. But here’s the scary thing. Reboot your Mac, and the problems go away. And there aren’t any problems with Acrobat reader.

I can’t reproduce this here on my Macs: the book was developed exclusively in an OSX environment and I’ve never seen the problem. So I’m wondering if anyone out there has any ideas on how to attack this. It’d be easy to shrug and say it’s a bug in Preview, but I’d rather find a workaround than inconvenience folks using the One True Operating System. (dave at pragprog . com)

Rails Podcast

I must be hip, because I’m on a Podcast. Scott Barron interviewed me for the second edition of his Ruby on Rails Podcast. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about why I’m in Texas, how the book source is maintained, and get a sneak-peak at some new ideas we’re pursuing…

The ServerSide Interview

I give a couple of talks at a ServerSide symposium a long time ago. Dion Almaer took the opportunity to interview me, and they just put the video online. (Boy, do I hate the picture they chose as the key frame.)

I suspect the business about package scoping might be misinterpreted by some: what I was trying to say was that Java’s lack of an explicit keyword for package scoping leads many developers not to use it as much as they should. I think I’ll blog about those ideas separately.

Rails and FUD

Large organizations sometimes fall into the bad habit of marketing through fear. IBM once had this reputation—their sales folks would sow FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) in customers contemplating solutions from other vendors. The practice is now (sadly) widespread, particularly among larger organizations whose product lines have ossified somewhat.

One of the convenient things about FUD is that it’s easy. Unlike real marketing analyses, where you have to understand both your products and the opposition’s products, you can play the FUD game from a position of total ignorance. "Sure, they claim they can do that, but that must be too good to be true. Clearly there must be a catch, and they must be scum for not telling you what it is. Better stick with us…"

It’s interesting to see that Rails seems to be attracting its share of FUD. After Curt Hibbs wrote an OnLamp article about Rails, David Geary dismissed its claims out of hand, ending with Here, you take this ROR koolaid. I'll stick with the JSF flavor. (Although David clearly should have washed his hands. Some Koolaid powder must have stuck, as last night he gave a talk to the Denver Jug (here’s a writeup) extolling the 5-10x productivity gains in Rails, and he and Bruce Tate are writing a Rails book).

Now we have Patrick Peak comparing the professional way Java applications are deployed with the clearly amateurish hacks of Ruby developers (Quotes like Assuming Rails developers use source control give you the overall flavor). This piece is great—he even says in it "Well, honestly, I don’t know for certain what this looks like…" before going on to make up a set of practices followed by Rails developers, and then criticising them.

Fortunately, Jamis Buck took the time to describe how deployment works at 37signals.

I normally don’t like all these rounds of attack/defend blog posts that seem to crop up. But at the same time, I really don’t like the way that ignorance is used as a weapon. It belittles the discussion, reflects badly on the poster, and alienates communities that have a lot to learn from each other. I give Ruby and Rails talks to Java developers most weeks, and I find genuine interest and honest questions. I respect that, and try to learn from it. So let’s ty to keep it at that level, and leave the FUD to the suits, eh?

We Reached the Station

Agile Web Development with Rails has been finalized. We worked hard with our printers, Malloy, to come up with what is possibly the most agile book publishing schedule ever. As a result, the final PDF went in for printing today (with 47 pages changed since I first sent them the book a week or so ago), and the books will be bound and boxed on July 28. They then enter the distribution phase, so it’ll still be a week or so before they start shipping, but it looks as if we’ll have some for OSCON.

Some stats:

• The PML source for the book is about 145k words, and the files weigh in at 1.3Mb.
• There are 1041 Ruby and rhtml source code files used as examples in the book (about 560kb).
• The book went through roughly 2000 Subversion commits since inception.
• Reviewers generated well in excess of 6Mb of comments.
• We’ve had four released versions of the beta book, and now one final version.
• Beta readers made over 780 suggestions, comments, and typo reports, most of which made their way into the printed book.
• To date the book has been bought by people in sixty three countries (that blows me away).

Thank you again to everyone who trusted the process and participated in the Beta program. You can update to the final version of the PDF at the regular URL (I’ll be sending an e-mail around to you all sometime today with the link).

And for everyone else—the folks waiting for the dust to settle before exploring the book—now’s a great time to come on board. Welcome!

We're Out of Beta

The Rails book is now out of beta. We’re officially a Release Candidate! (In practice, this means the book has been sent to the printers. We can still fix typos, at least until we get proofs back from the printer, but there’ll be no major changes for a while.) The PDF version of this release candidate book is the one currently shipping. As usual, existing PDF owners can upgrade themselves using the handy-dandy reorder web page.

One of the things I really like about the new PDF is the code hyperlinks. The little [File nn] lozenges in the margins next to code extracts are now live hyperlinks to the corresponding source file up on our media server. If you want to see the full code corresponding to an example, click, and it appears in your browser. (And, of course, all the code is available as a tarball or zip file.)

Rails 0.13!

David HH just announced the release of Rails 0.13. This is big news: there are a boatload of new features in it, including great Ajax support, performance improvements, easier caching, named routes, and the infamous additions to the render() method.

This is big from my point of view, too. The Beta Book documented many of these new features, and the thousands of folks who were coding along with the tutorial previously had to use beta Gems to get stuff to work. Now they’ll be able to use regular old Gems from RubyForge.

  gem update

should download acres of goodness onto your machine.

Stay tuned for an announcement on the book front too :)