ruby

I have just purchased a Mac laptop and am planning to partition it to run OSX and Ubuntu. Currently I use Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows for development projects. My concern is whether there is an equivalent to Visual Studio and the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) on OS X or Ubuntu?

Today I was asked this question, one which is very similar to others I have been asked and answered in the past. In Windows the decisions a developer must make prior to starting coding are relatively simple because it is an environment dominated by Visual Studio. When making the move to OSX or Linux the decisions facing the developer are more complicated because no single company dominates these platforms in the same way Microsoft does Windows.

Outside of this Microsoft’s sphere of influence is a large number of avenues to consider which can significantly influence the productivity and even success, of your software project. The short answer is there no direct equivalent to Visual Studio and MSDN for OSX or Ubuntu, but there are plenty of satisfactory alternatives. In making your decision consider what languages you use now, or are interested in learning in the future. Also identify what general platform you wish to develop for; be it the desktop, server, web or mobile. And always remember whilst none of these discussed paths are wrong, some are more right than others depending on the project.

Java One is turning out to be quite interesting this year. Not only has the Java license been changed to allow for easier distribution in Linux channels, but there is also a lot of buzz about coding in different languages for the JavaVM. The most tantalizing from a business perspective is Sun's commitment to get Visual Basic running within the JavaVM. Whilst it will not be practical to get Visual Basic applications written specifically for Windows frameworks running, (that is what Mono is for) it still will be interesting to see whether this significantly grows the Java (as a concept rather than a language) developer community. Even though Visual Basic may be ported across the fact it won't be tightly integrated into Windows like traditional Visual Basic it will more than likely not encourage a mass-migration of low-end, practical developers as some would hope. Still it will be nice to be able to get basic software written in by someone who only knows Visual Basic and have it able to run on any platform that supports the JavaVM.

Thomas Fuchs, the guy behind script.aculo.us recently did a presentation in San Francisco about AJAX that looked pretty interesting. He has is slide show online in PDF format here. Associated notes made during the presentation have been put online by the guys at Ajaxian.

Over the weekend I finished the transition from my PowerBook to the Intel based iMac as my primary development platform. Rather than use the PowerPC only Flock or stick with Safari I have started using an unofficical Intel compiled version of Firefox. Performance is excellent and there are no issues with reliability, Java or Flash.

Installing Rails and ImageMagick turned out to be very straightforward thanks to DarwinPorts, the Rails on OSX wiki and the ImageMagick on OSX howto. Currently there is no Intel compiled DarwinPorts binary but fortunately it compiled from source without issue (once the Apple Developer Tools were installed).
In the process I found a nice Eclipse plugin for Ruby on Rails named RadRails.

I had heard the name 37signals before as they are a leading Ruby on Rails development house but I had never really thought of checking out what they were up to until this week. It turns out their Basecamp product is a very tidy project management tool with a rather large following. Feature-wise it is fairly simple and is completely centralised around the 37signals server farm (no local Intranet version). Rather than focus on email processes 37signals picks up on the blog model of posts and comments with a central (unversioned?) file repository. It appears their target audience is distributed Web developers who need a simple way to manage the comings and goings of a small group of workers.

After some Googl'ing, reading and playing about I have got Ruby on Rails running on my SuSE 9.2 server. The process was made difficult by the need to compile quite a few different pieces of software from source and configure mod_fastcgi (which has not been worked on for a while). If you are stuck on this subject take a look at the tutorial here:

http://www.stress-free.co.nz/node/163/59/