For those of you that don’t know, “TivoHME”:http://tivohme.sourceforge.net/ is, basically, an SDK to allow developers (or enthusiasts) to provide services to TivoHMO. However, most enthusiasts are most likely not programmers, and even less likely Java programmers. Luckily, with Jython, they don’t have to be — they can use Python instead. At least one person has “successfully used Jython with TivoHME”: http://jacobian.org/recipes/archives/2005/01/31/python-on-your-tivo/. This could be quite fun.
February 21st, 2005:
Ruby on Rails Components
Anyone who closely follows “Rails”:http://www.rubyonrails.com/ development has been suffering some serious shock and awe lately. At least for me, one by one, every complaint I’ve ever had about Rails (during those times when I’m being really nit picky) is being solved in the core.
Just last week, “Routes”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/02/15/routing-now-available-in-beta-gems/ were added, removing the need to deal with mod_rewrite or ugly URLs. Along with this came the ability to place models and controllers into modules (implemented as real Ruby modules). Both of these features are something I had attempted to hack into the core myself and decided to try again later when I had a better understanding of Ruby.
Today, I hear that Rails will have “real components”:http://www.hyperionreactor.net/node/41. While DHH may be more inclined to write low-level task specific code there are many of us (myself included) who aim to write software that will all but *require* the end-user to edit and customize it. Components were yet another feature that I was working on adding in myself and it’s quite nice to see this in the core.
If Rails’ Routes would support arbitrary characters as a separation indicators within the path, as opposed to just the forward slash (this would most likely mean a RegExp based implementation), and the ActiveRecord support allowed for a clean way to specify different database connection information for each model (if desired), I think I would be out of “feature requests” entirely.
Excellent work is going into Rails, folks. Whether you know Ruby or not, I strongly urge any web (or webservices, thanks to the new ActionService Controller) developers to “check it out”:http://www.rubyonrails.com/.