RDF is DOOMed and other links

• The Future of the World Wide Web, testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, via Seth Ladd. Some commentry by Nate Anderson.
• Peak Code "At some point, half of the total lines of code for that platform will be written. The further a platform gets past its peak, the less attractive adding new features to it becomes since there is less and less potential return on investment due to the dwindling number of programs that could benefit from the improvements."
• REST Issues, Real and Imagined False Choice: “High” vs. “Low” REST, Red Herring: The Evils of POST, Red Herring: URI Design, Red Herring: Cookies Are Bad and False Choice: Machines vs. People. Sure to be answered in, "REST Books Galore (Sam Ruby also mentions the recent flood of REST books).
• RDFRoom DOOM rendering of FOAF via Semantic Desktop Workshop wrapup
• What engineering has in common with manufacturing and why it matters "Engineering – software engineering in our case – is remarkably like manufacturing, once we shift to view the unvalidated decision as the unit of internal inventory."
• It’s Not RDF versus Microformats "If your world is limited to business cards, social events and reviews then I can see where you might favour expression in HTML. Humans want to read those things too. But the world is bigger than social networking and there are other types of first-class data that people want to exchange with one another."
• Ruby on Rails IDE comparison. Favours NetBeans.
• The State of Swing Mentions one of the small Java 6 enhancements, SwingWorker.

JRuby now does Rails**

"** We are able to generate and run the cookbook demo from rolling with rails tutorial (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html) with what we have and all appears to work. With this said, it is likely that there are several aspects of rails that are not working correctly. See docs/README.rails for known issues/instructions in release."

JRuby "WEBrick runs...Ruby on Rails runs on top of WEBrick (and generation scripts work)**"

Time for a free lunch:

"I believe I've found a 'free lunch' in Ruby on rails. Oh, it's not always free. If I need to do two-phased commit or hardcore object relational mapping, this lunch may cost me more than I'm willing to pay. But often enough, it's for all practical purposes free.

* I can train a team of Rails developers faster than I can teach a new Java developer Spring plus Hibernate plus whatever web mvc you want plus all of the other frameworks and tools Java developers have to know.
* I can build my applications much faster than I could before.
* For many applications, the latency in the database is the overriding concern, so I don't even notice differences in performance.
* I can trivially expose web services, letting other applications, potentially written in other languages, quickly access my Rails services.

Now, I know that some will tell me that the lunch really isn't free. But you can tell that to my customers that pay a fraction of the price they'd pay for a Java application, and get something that's easier to maintain, just as fast, and on an earlier schedule. From that exec's perspective, the lunch is free."

Shiny Languages

Reasons Why Your Startup Should Use Ruby On Rails (RoR) "When tempted to adopt the newest “silver bullet” technology that promises immense gains in programmer productivity (which RoR does), understand what the tradeoffs are. To get even keener insight, study a little bit of history and find out what has come before. It’s possible that in your situation RoR is indeed the best choice, but likely not for the reasons above. If you find yourself agreeing with one of the eight reasons above, we really need to talk."

Another related article, "Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP".

And, "SQL On Rails".

Via Javalobby.

Ruby on Rails Development

"At the end of the day you sit there and realise that you spent the entire day writing 100 lines of code and then deleting 90 of them. :)"

And the perverse thing is, I couldn't think of anything more satisfying than going through that process.

The Rails Development Pattern.

Ten Times

What's the Secret Sauce in Ruby on Rails? links to Crossing borders: What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails? "Debates about Rails in the Java community have been intense and show no sign of dying down any time soon. Rails proponents boast of incredible productivity, with some claims of 10 to 1 over Java development. As a Java programmer, your knee-jerk response is to dismiss any wild productivity claims because you've likely heard them before and been disappointed. Java advocates increasingly insist that Ruby on Rails is a toy that can't scale, produces bad code, and won't work beyond the simplest applications. But as Rails praise keeps popping up -- often from credible sources -- a more prudent course might be to understand what Rails does well and to bring those ideas back to the Java platform. In this article, I'll explore the core features -- the secret sauce -- that are the essence of Rails's great productivity."

If Ruby is up to 10 times more productive that makes it about as productive as Python, Tcl and Perl, see "An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages".

Really Dynamic Framework

Semantic Rails, Semantic Django: Pushing RDF into MVC "...what Rails-Django would look like if instead of SQL and RDBMS... What if the "M" in MVC were composed of RDF, SPARQL, and a triplestore like Kowari?

Sure, Kowari is probably slower than MySQL, and you probably know SQL a lot better than SPARQL, but RDF is a schemaless data representation thingie. You can start with as little or as much schema as you want or need, and you can use the full expressive power of OWL (which is significantly more powerful than SQL's DDL) when you need it."

Four points are raised in "Semantic MVC".

nodel - HOWTO "Nodel is a kind of application generator. It is a halfway house between the ontomatic, which isn't yet stable enough in implementation or customisable enough in interface, and the nodedb, which was very hardcoded and application specific."

Related to: RDF, the ultimate agile database, Another Agile Database User and Scripting the Semantic Web.