I'm somewhat liberated and doing more heads up work these days. Taking an opportunity to do a bit of coding reminds me that I have gotten rusty. So I will be burning more time doing the tech thing because as much as I think I can remember, there is no substitution for muscle memory. So it's time for me to flex a bit more. I'm also becoming convinced more and more that a ridiculously large portfolio is more than the sum of its parts. And so that gives me license to code in Rails and Javascript, two frameworks I have long considered beneath me. And yet what has gone on with HTML and a dozen other things has caught me flat footed. So better for me to stick to pushups, as pedestrian as that may be, than worry about buying the wrong size kettlebell. In otherwords, I'm just doing, and will let the doing speak for itself. Glad I remembered this. It has been more than ten years since I've uttered the word 'scaffolding'. My bad. I'll be prototyping, because that needs doing.
Aww crap. I don't want to be a webslinger. But if I don't do it who is going to do it? Whaaaa!
When I wanted to be a web guy, it was 13 years ago, before there were blogs and CMS systems were just vague ideas. The last time I touched Javascript when 1.2 was new and people were still thinking this ECMA thing would be the real standard. Who knows what it is now. Yeah I know, you do and I don't. Poor poor pitiful me. Well, I have training time between contracts and I have to build front-ends to my wonderful scripts. Why? Let's just say that there comes a point when you can no longer stand Windows fat clients no matter how wonderful they are. I have come to that point - the point at which what I need to do for each customer becomes so specialized that a mere CLI is insufficient to its complexity. Also, I'm forgetful and I'd like big fat buttons with instructions I wrote reminding me what happens when I push it.
I have been avoiding this task for too many years and now the future is upon me. What a slag heap.
Six months ago I first picked up Markdown which is a clean simple way of authoring nice texts. I used Markdown (and still do) because cranking out wikis, no matter how good it sounds on paper, is never quite as good for me as straight narrative step by step text. So along with Markdown, I found this supposedly good thing called Jekyll. I used it to build a semi-static website. It was working fairly nicely until I changed one thing, and then the whole edifice collapsed. I still have 40 or 50 odd blog posts from what was supposed to be my daily log in consolidated style. Still nothing comes close to MovableType - the platform I've been blogging on for a decade (and I used to host it myself). So I need to recover all that and find a place to put it.
Some time before I started playing with Jekyll (and hosting Jekyll on linode.com) I went through a Sinatra thing. Sinatra promised to be brain dead simple, and it is, IF you understand REST and you have some clue as to all of the plumbing they have put into webservers over the past 10 years. Guess who has no clue? Nevertheless I have returned to Sinatra this past week because necessity is a mother. The good news is my Ruby-fu is much stronger than the first time I dabbled with Sinatra and so I can make out the difference between its DSL and normal Ruby syntax. Again that time was during the days of rspec too. Three different Ruby syntaxes can be taxing. But now I'm more comfortable.
That doesn't change the complexity. And I can see how a lot of complexity has been injected into the web since I last did some CGI stuff in the Flintstone era. Here's what I gather. There are a bunch of competing Javascript libraries out there. Now javascript is your basic language that runs in browsers that basically turn them into general purpose fat clients that do drag and drop, accordians and fading, spinning two dimensional dialog boxes in color coordinated forms. There is a .js for every occasion and this is the dizzying world I'm stepping into.
Now I've heard of Node.js. There are all kinds of support groups for its fanbase here in LA and I would gather, elsewhere. And there's a bunch of libraries supported by Google as well. It seems to me that these are the equivalent of mini APIs built for making the dialog between browsers and sebservers more complex over the overburdened HTTP protocol. I'm getting somewhere but I'm not sure I'll like it.
So here's what I've got going so far. I have replaced RVM with rbenv. I will use rbenv to support Ruby and JRuby. I will use Sinatra to be my general purpose framework. This may get me into trouble when I want to do some controller stuff. (Five years ago I started playing with Rails. It broke back then before it got sophisticated and stable and so I let it drop, but I liked the idea better than Joomla). So just before I started again with Sinatra this weekend, I installed some rails gems. Now I know a lot of people live inside the complexities of activeBlather-something or other which is a well travelled neural pathway in the Rails world, but I think it probably makes some database stuff stupider than I need it. So for the moment I'm going to sacrifice all the scaffolding fun of Rails for the simplicity of Sinatra. As I said, I might get me into trouble, but we'll see.
Right now I'm figuring out the large gross places to put stuff, and I hope to settle into a decent groove. You see there are a host of oddities with overlap. For convention's sake, I'm going to use a package of standard web-bling called Bootstrap. Apparently when you drop the Bootstrap folder into your Public folder (where Sinatra expects static templates, as contrasted with erbs) then you get a bunch of nifty looking graphics and a new language for blinging out CSS.
Now long ago and far away, I avoided CSS like the plague. Why? Because I used Microsoft Front Page and it put CSS into those gawdawful _vtf subdirectories, and of course it confused CSS with _vtf and generally bastardized everyting. But I see that the CSS baby has been rescued from the .NET scumwater. So now I have to pay attention to <div> tags, which I generally hate to do. Why? Because when I cut and paste into my blog, one unbalanced <div> tag rips a hole in the space-time continuum. Speaking of rips, when did Dreamweaver end up costing over 400 bucks? This digital production economy is crazy inflationary. Oh well.
Tonight I'm checking out AngularJS which seems to be almost reasonable, especially considering what it apparently replaces in raw Javascript. So I have to make sense of it and see what the difference is between it and JQueryUI and JQuery and all the other stuff out there that ends with a .js. What could go wrong?
Well, streaming in Sinatra is going wrong for me right now, and I figure I've got to get into some fundamentals. See there's Puma and Webrick and Thin, all HTTP servers of various capacities and complexities which will augment my ability to write Ruby based websites and services. Since my direction is the multi-threadability of JRuby coming up Java's JVM backdoor, I figure it will be Puma for me, but let's see if I can get the damned thing working.
I splurged on Freeway Pro as an intermediate authoring tool which I expect to help me generate all kinds of pretty webcrap, but I suspect it won't handle all these .js alphabet soup as well as I'd like. On the whole I think there's no easy way out.
On the whole, I think I'm going to enjoy this development more than I did with security in the first half of this year. Instead of incurable paranoia, I will build nice, hackable websites to go along with my backend skills. Thank you big brother, may I have another O'Reilly books please.
I am between projects, and I feel the pull of the imperative. When I have time, not working, my mind reminds me of all those things I don't know. And so I need to know which means when I have a minute I prefer to learn rather than to be entertained. At least I do when I have peace of mind, which I do right now.
But since I'm such a scatterbrain, I'm going to need to blog my way to sanity and keep track of all the 20 minute foci I am able to maintain when my impatience gets the better of me and I pop from window to window.
So I'm reading my Java and my Python, learning both simultaneously. I'd like to play with Ruby and may have to, but it feels like cheating and I've been cheating too long. I need to address the sophisticated fundamentals so that I can make choices more intelligently in the future. In otherwords I'm invoking the Overkill Rule.
So I've got Eclipse set up on each of my machines. I'm making Vega into the big server - although I should probably have one more server. I'll have to figure out what's light enough to put on the smaller machines. I think at the very least, I'll have LDAP on Metis. Although I'm finding it very easy to do installs on OS X, and it works the way I like - so there's a decent chance I get a Mac Mini for Christmas.
I am getting frustrated finding a decent JDBC driver set for free. I've gotten the connections to work across the two MySql databases that I've setup using Toad for SQL, SQLYog and MySQL Workbench, but not quite there with the Eclipse SQL plugin. Yes of course its overkill, which is, as I said, the point. What I really want is a good set so I can play with the basics and then wrap my Talend and PDI toolsets around them. But I got source level packages which meant I had to figure out the com.blah.this.thatDriver file hierarchy and stuff for Java. Should be easy in a couple weeks as I get to understand the differences between the way Eclipse would build stuff and how Git would (with Ant?). So the current task is getting a handle on Java builds, debugs, packages, classes and all that organizational rot. Annoying Frosh stuff.
I'm pretty sure that I don't want NetBeans. I think I'll be happy enough with Tomcat and ignore JBoss and Glassfish and won't worry about the integration. I tend to go a bit old school anyway and got TextWrangler (instead of BBEdit) for the Mac. Since I can run shebang..
