We had a big argument about that playing Shadowrun a few years ago. MM was the GM and he had to admit the rules were kinda messed up with the pricing and size structure when I pulled a miniSD card out of my cell phone that was the size of a fingernail and cost less than $50. The game was supposed to be so advanced and the authors just never even guess that things would get so tiny so quickly.

Shadowrun x-post. BWAH!

To be fair to Shadowrun, in the 4th edition they also said "Storage, for game purposes, is pretty much fuckin' free. It's cheap, it's small...just don't worry about it."

I suspect there was an unspoken plea of "...and stop e-mailing us Circuit City ads for flash drives and miniSD cards. We get it. Stop!"

Sorry for the long delay. I've been busy with a coup d'etat at work, putting down the reactionaries and writing a new constitution.

In my last job, I worked on the web front end for [link] I also have a video sharing app under development as a side project, and did an online version of a board game, also as a side project.

The best thing about Ruby on Rails is Ruby. It's an elegant, object oriented language that has become my favorite for just about any programming task. In particular, I like that it is object-oriented throughout and has closures.

Rails is pretty good too, though. It used the Model/View/Controller pattern to good effect, and it imposes a pleasing organization to a web application by default. And it has a choice of two really good testing frameworks, Test::Unit and Rspec. These sorts of testing frameworks are great aids to maintenance.

The object-relation mapping package in Rails, Active Record, is really easy to use. You can write statements like Dog.find_by_name_and_breed("Nutmeg", "Boston Terrier") and it will generate the correct SQL for you and then map the results into objects of class Dog. You can also tell it about the relationships between tables (has_many, belongs_to, that sort of thing) and it will write the joins for you.

As for performance, it's not the fastest web application environment around, but it does use a share-nothing architecture so that it's easy to add hardware to scale up to the point where your application servers aren't the bottleneck anymore.

Thanks, Rob. Teaser.I do love MVC, and faking that is a big part of what I want to do in the b.org code reorg.

I think I'll have to install RoR on one of the boxes at home and play.

Well, you can look around more at [link] I haven't put up much content yet, but you can get the idea.

Thanks.

Weirdly I suddenly had a flashback to RPG. It shares a "Well, we both know there are some fairly consistent things we can leave as subtext." Not to to mention the whole neat angle on data.

I came out of a Modula 2/C++ place with respect to data when I left school and bumped into the real world of code. I was so relieved to find out that I wouldn't need to be coding link lists 40 hours a week. Hell, the language automatically iterates through your datasets! That's a hell of a shared assumption. Which worked perfectly where we were using it.

But when you didn't want to? OY! I worry about RoR making everything looking like a nail.

RoR is quite narrowly focused. It's only useful for web applications with fairly simple database requirements and where you have good control over the deployment environment.

One of the weaknesses of RoR is that it spurns many useful features of relational databases. It has no support for using foreign key constraints or stored procedures, and if you try to use them anyway it can be quite painful.

Another weakness is deployment. You pretty much have to use FastCGI or something even fancier, like apache with mod_proxy fronting a cluster of mongrel web servers if you are going to host a largish number of users.

I'm surprised at the lack of support for foreign key constraints. That's one of the things I find annoying to duplicate when I'm trying to be a good little MVC girl.

But I can see the stored procedures thing. I want to use them to fake atomicity, but I can see where that might get in the way of their desired stratification.

Oh, and what's up with the web server reqs?