CrudVision - Lisa Seelye

September 17, 2007

Flex Tutorial

Filed under: RailsConfEurope, RailsConfEurope07, flex — Lisa Seelye @ 19:00

First thing: The tutorial was certainly geared for people with an interest in Flash or Flex.

The Rails side was minimal at best: “Here’s some rails source, get it running then open Flex Builder”. Okay, no problem. Managed to get the project converted to Postgres (the DBRMS I have on my Mac) and played with the scaffolded HTML interface.

I kept getting NullPointerExceptions when I attempted the most basic tasks within the Flex Builder IDE. After a while I gave up and realised that it was only Flex markup (I hesitate to call Flex code since it appears to be mostly XML markup!) being written. I have no interest in Flex or being a Flex developer. I’m happy with Ruby and Rails. I came to the tutorial hoping to get some inight into integration problems we’ve had at work. Unfortunately that didn’t happen except for at the very end (and our project is far beyond the point where we could have implemented it).

I suppose the lecture wasn’t bad for people who came into it with different expectations. I just expected something other than what it was.

Refactoring Rails

Filed under: RailsConfEurope, RailsConfEurope07, rails, testing — Lisa Seelye @ 11:44

I must say that Trotter Cashion’s presentation on refactoring wasn’t totally new material. At work we have at least one project that desperately needs some refactor/rewrite love. I’m hoping to convince bossmen that it’s a good idea to rework its source. ;)

One of the things he mentioned is that not refactoring is like accruing debt. It made sense immediately. I’ve said before that it’s easier and more fun to work with a codebase that is well written and easy to read. Not refactoring (or rewriting when necessary) is the way to not give yourself a good codebase. No one can, from the start, architect the perfect application, code, or methods. Cruft begins to collect when the coder is under time constraints and begins to hinder work because cruft on top of cruft means a lot of searching to find out what the code is doing before anything can be done!

The next session is the “Flex on Rails” tutorial and that should be painful and evil.

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