Halogen Labs

Since my blogging has been nonexistent for a while, especially blogging about Cocoon, perhaps readers would be better off checking out Spread Cocoon, a fabulous site by Mark Leicester geared towards promoting all that is Cocoon. +1000 :)

(via Sollaires.net and some help from Google)

Here I am, sitting in my apartment at 9 PM, and my thoughts drifted to improving our office and our system. This is something my previous boss really wanted me to do (he thought I was a very talented programmer, but lacked “intensity,” in his own words), but I never had the desire to think about medical claims processing in my off hours. This is probably due not just to the fact that medical claims processing is one of the most boring problems out there, but also because my direct manager made iit abundantly clear that any thought outside of his plans was, to put it lightly, not welcome.

OK, I broke down and started playing with Ruby on Rails, the MVC framework-du-jour.

Stuff I like so far:

• Rapid Development
• Some stuff feels a lot like Cocoon

Stuff I don’t like:

• Ruby code embedded in views — You have got to be kidding me!
• All of the ActionXXXXX terminology stolen from Struts. Give it up already! ActionXXXXX is worthless, and makes stuff seem more important than it is. Just call stuff what they are.
• Having to run stuff as a CGI
• ActiveRecord looks like it pollutes your object model

So far, I’m impressed. There’s a lot of stuff RoR could learn from Cocoon, and vice versa, I think. I’m not too fond of the Active Record pattern, I’d much rather use a DAO to store objects. I’m sure it’s easy to implement a DAO to use in Rails, but I think they should have made using a DAO as easy as using an ActiveRecord.

That being said, I’m still going to play with RoR, and I might start even using it to prototype stuff before developing things with Cocoon. Rails might have Cocoon beat with respect to Model, and maybe even controller (hmm.. actually not.). Cocoon beats the pants off Rails when it comes to view rendering though.

Congrats to the team, I’m sorry I haven’t been active. It’s great to see the project moving forward though!! :)

Well, last week I found out my lower RAM slot in my Rev. C Aluminum Powerbook was dead, so I had to ship it to Apple to get repaired. They have a pretty keen tracking system where you can check the status of your machine as they work on it. Even better, is that they overnight it each way. Talk about expensive.

Anyway, it looks like the work was finished and my Powerbook will return tomorrow with a new motherboard in it. Time to start saving up for AppleCare. If it wasn’t under warranty, it would have easily been another $700 to repair.