vesterberg.se

I spent five days at a developers Ccnference a few months ago here in Sweden. I listened to a whole lot of interesting seminars and some not so interesting. I was particulary interested in two sessions that was about Ruby and Rails (RoR). I was not impressed by the presentations. The first speaker hadn’t that much experience and some of his demos failed. The second (leading a workshop) failed to get the neccessary programs (Radrails) loaded in our PC’s. He was enthusiatic about Rails and assured many times that Rails makes development easy, but the participants probably left his workshop with the feeling that RoR is difficult and not ready for real usage. Doing demos and hands-on is taking a risk. You cannot just show up on time and assume that others has prepared things, especially if you believe in what you are to present.

I also went to a couple of sessions about Unity Testing and TDD (test driven development). I am all for testing, but often in projects there is a pressure to deliver and keeping deadlines. You have to be practical. What I mean is this, with all the good methods, approaches and tools, we have to be pragmatic and wise. To be experienced is to be wise, take from your toolbox and apply what is needed the most. TDD-people sometimes sounds like they write test-methods for even the most tiny and obvious method they have.

When EJB came, it became popular and every Java project used EJB and reaped the consequences thereof. When something rises and becomes popular, we ought to study it for a while, let it challenge our ideas and preconceptions and then integrate it with our previous experience.