gmosx

Marketing acquisitions?

by gmosx, at 26 Sep 2009
When marketing people drive company acquisitions you can expect peculiar results. 

Consider Nokia. They bought Trolltech, yet they used GTK over Qt in Maemo5 (though I am hearing they 'll switch to Qt in the next version). What about Novel? The acquired Ximian (founded by Gnome hackers), yet they offer KDE as the default SuSE Linux desktop (true, they where probably more interested in Mono). 

 Go figure...

Yet another JavaScript template

by gmosx, at 13 Jul 2009
There are many JavaScript templating solutions, yet I couldn't find one that suited my needs. Well, json-template came pretty close, but the JavaScript source code was hard to read and extend, so I decided to implement a simplified version for use in Nitro. There are some minor differences but the spirit is the same.

Some days ago I decided to extract the template into a separate Narwhal package:

http://github.com/gmosx/template/tree/master

You can now use the Template without requiring the whole Nitro stack.

Nitro in Javascript

by gmosx, at 28 Feb 2009
It's no secret that I am working on a web application framework. I was bored (not to say unhappy) with my old Ruby framework, so during the past year, I designed and implemented no less than 3 different Ruby versions and 2 different JavaScript versions. This blog, for example, runs on my latest Ruby experiment.

Why I kept redesigning the framework you ask? Well, I wanted to make sure the design is as simple, as standards compliant and as transparent as possible. Some days ago I started a new revision. This time I am confident I 'll nail down a great balance between simplicity and power. I am using JavaScript, a truly excellent language with an unfortunate name. JavaScript is the obvious choice in an era where the distinction between server and client is blurred. The show stopper for JavaScript is the omission of a standard library. Thankfully, Rhino and Java come to the rescue.

I 've released some preliminary code on github. The project is still called Nitro, but apart from the name, it has nothing in common with my older effort. There is not much in the repository yet but you can expect regular updates. Of course, I will chronicle the latest developments here.

Even at this early stage, I would love to hear comments, suggestions and ideas for further improvements or better refactoring.

Nitro in print

by gmosx, at 05 Dec 2006
Some days ago, my copy of The Ruby Way, Second Edition arrived. I was extremely pleased to see the chapters on Nitro and Og. Given the fact that lack of documentation is this project's showstopper, I would suggest that every programmer interested on these technologies grabs a copy of this book right now! Moreover, you get one of the best books about the Ruby language for free. You have to thank James Britt for the Nitro/Og specific sections of the book.

To tell you the truth, there is one thing that bugs me about this book. Even though the names of the devlopers behind other Web Development Frameworks (like Rails and Wee) are mentioned, my name was nowhere to be found. Oh well…