Quick, Brief Update

This blog used to just be place to dump homework to show my teachers I could blog, but I’ve decided to make it somewhat more functional since my friends have said that I should be sharing some of the stuff I’ve been working on.

I’m a php and flash developer and I am always trying out technologies that will benefit my skills and production.

I should thank Michael Slater for showing me www.LearningRails.com and I have setup a Rails site locally with Locomotive and I did download the free Ruby on Rails book SitePoint was giving away . I think its a great platform, but for my current needs it does kinda go beyond them. But thanks Michael and I would recommend anyone to give RoR a look. MVC is definitely the future.

Open Source Framework Study

Ruby on Rails

“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming. Powerful web applications that formerly might have
taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days.”
- Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’reilly Media

Ruby on Rails was pioneered by David Heinemeier Hansson by “extracting common functionality such as database abstraction and templating”. It was built with the intention of making it very easy to build web applications that communicate with databases and following these programming practices:

• convention over configuration
• don’t repeat yourself
• agile development
• MVC

Convention over Configuration

This refers to the fact that Ruby on Rails framework was designed to be easily set up and developers could start building applications right away. The intention was to make it simple to set up and not has to go through rigorous configuration files.

There are a number of installers designed to set up the Ruby framework:
• Locomotive for Mac Users
• Instant Rails for PC Users
• Ruby Gems for Command Line Coders

The reason for this development was simple: you’re not “forced to repeat
the entire configuration process whenever you start a new project.”

Don’t Repeat Yourself or DRY

DRY is a programming principle in which you don’t rewrite or copy and paste code throughout the development. According to Sitepoint’s, “Build Your Own Ruby On Rails
Web Applications”, DRY is defined as,

“…you develop your application in such a way that this functionality
is stored once, in a central location, and is referenced from each portion of the
application that needs to use it.”

Agile Development

Rails has a built in framework that is designed for quick application development. It is intended to get developer right into the essence of the project as opposed to spending lengths of time flowcharting and configuring a static plan for the goals and needs of an application using predictive methods.

Rails recommends the top-down approach. Starting with a simple design, which could be a sketch on a napkin, and then evolving into functionality and back end development. The Rails framework was designed to take care of most of the back end work, so developers can invest more time into building.

Excerpt from “Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition”,

Let’s look at the values expressed in the Agile Manifesto as a set of four preferences.
Agile development favors the following.
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Rails is all about individuals and interactions.

MVC

“The Model-view-controller (MVC) is a software architecture (also referred to as a design pattern) that separates an application’s data model (model), user interface (view), and control logic (controller) into three distinct components.”

Conclusion

Ruby on Rails is becoming very popular for web development. It has already won many several awards, including developer.com’s Product of the Year 2007 Award. Because of its speed, simplicity, strong programming principles, and readiness for developers to jump in and start making dynamic database-driven application, Ruby on Rails is pioneering the open source web development community.

Sources

Agile Web Development With Rails, 2nd Edition 2006
By Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson

Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications
by Patrick Lenz

http://www.rubyonrails.org

http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3653956

Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism is a growing trend that encourages the public to be a participant in the shaping of information. Blogs, forums, and user comments on news and e-commerce sites have given citizens the ability to share their opinion and point of view.

Amazon, Future Shop, and other online retailers have given consumers the right to comment and vote on products, which has become a large resource of information that would otherwise be non-existent. It has become the virtual equivalent to asking your neighbour what they thought of the latest digital camera or television set.

User contributed new sites are becoming very common. Places like Slashdot and Engadget, where almost all the news articles are pulled in by users from other resources. These kinds of practices have created communities where like minded individuals can share news they have found and bring it into open discussion.

Citizen journalism stems from people who know exactly what they want to say and want a way to share their opinion. It has created forums and communities where people can vote, chat, and share what they find interesting. Essentially, in citizen journalism, everyone can have and share their opinion.

Chinese Poetry and the Beauty of CSS

My personal website was in serious need of revival. It did not follow the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium and the navigation system for it was brutal. It was very dependent on the navigation system of the browser for users to move within.

I decided to create a gallery of web pages built with XHTML and CSS Layout. It would be a way to show various designs, but I needed them to all carry a similar theme, so that they did have some relationship to each other.

Many years ago, while visiting friends in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I discovered a bookstore. It was the kind of old bookstore that had piles and piles of books everywhere. There were books on the floor, on tables, and even piles being used as tables. It was definitely the kind of place a book lover could spend hours getting lost in. My kind of place. After, perusing the many shelves of books, I found a book of classical Chinese Poetry.

Chinese Poetry is very emotional and visual. The emotional drive the poets deliver with is breathtakingly inspirational. Reading only a few lines, I was able to visualize scenes and characters acting in accordance with the poem.

Instead of using greeking (http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/), which is typical of most designer to use for presentational designs, I chose to select some poems from, “One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” translated by Kenneth Rexroth, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rexroth). I tried to design the web pages to best suit the mood of the poem in a metaphorical manner by imitating the aesthetics of an old book.

The gallery can be viewed at:

http://www.michaelcbreuer.com

Note: Pink Floyd’s Roger Water was apparently a fan of Chinese poetry and used it in some of his songs.

Read more about this at:

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=2085

http://www.cjvlang.com/Pfloyd/index.html

The Rise of Comic Books

I have always been a fan of comic books. I think I was 8 when I read my first Spiderman comic and have been a fan of the medium since. I am impressed at how strong it has grown and evolved into a means of communication. Sequential art and graphic novels have become accepted as literary means of expression.

The reason I have brought this topic up is because of an article I read at:

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/comics-not-just-for

It was appropriately titled Comics: Not just for laughs! by Rebekah Sedaca. It was an article written on how the comic book form is becoming a popular method of delivering visual instructions and sequential actions. Reading through the reader comments, it was fascinating to see how many professionals in the industry advocate using comics to express an idea in a clear and concise manner that can easily be understood. Viewing the actions removes the need of printed language.

Its awesome to see something that has been looked down upon or considered something for adolescents become as strong as it is today.

I would also like to make a quick reference to Comic Life (www.plasq.com). I recently discovered it among my applications on my Mac Book Pro. Making a comic strip or full comic book has never been so easy. Give it a try and see what creations you can make.

Here is a page I made quickly in Comic Life with an image and the capture option:

Now you try…

The Picky Type

Typography is so vital to an identity. I spent some time on the weekend researching various fonts and reading articles on the practice.

Its hard enough choosing a font to use, let alone finding one that is viewable by others. The limiting factor of web fonts motivated me to seek out another means of displaying them. With some advice from my web technologies teacher, he told me about Sifr (http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/). It allows you to display a font independent of the users system. Awesome little development tool. Now I have to select what font to make part of the identity for michaelcbreuer.com

I read the article “My Type Design Philosophy” by Martin Majoor (http://www.typotheque.com/articles/my_type_design_philosophy/) and found it very interesting. Majoor designed the Scala and Scala Sans font families. He discusses mixing two completely opposite fonts and using that to create “headaches”, which I think means, to get the viewer thinking or simply to make an impact. ie. placing garamod text beside univers.

But in essence, it means that I still have lots of reading to do.