Gears Within Gears

I’ve been knocking around ways to speed up ActiveResource recently. My colleague Tim Cochran discovered that you take a big performance hit from Hash.from_xml (which uses XmlSimple to transform the parsed XML into a hash with a particular structure) and I’ve knocked up a couple of alternatives, one for libxml-ruby and one for Hpricot. I haven’t packaged them up into a plugin yet, but I’ll attach the raw source, and hopefully that’ll help someone.

There’s already at least one other attempt to adapt libxml to ActiveResource floating around, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t work: it doesn’t place the resulting XML in a form that allows ActiveSupport to successfully undasherize the keys, deserialize primitives by their type attribute, and place the result in an ActiveResource object (though it is of course possible that I configured the library incorrectly). I’ve tested the parsers below against the corresponding XmlSimple call and I know that they succesfully deserialize into the desired end result.

• libxml
• hpricot currently broken (will fix if requested, 1/31/09)

I’m at RailsConf this weekend, capping a six-months engagement delivering a couple of Rails apps written using NetBeans as our team’s primary Ruby editor. We ended up with it because the client requested that we do our all development work in Ubuntu 6.06, and because we couldn’t build a consensus around a more lightweight editor like Vim or jEdit. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on it for anyone’s who’s interested in switching.

Executive Summary

There’s a lot to love and a fair amount to hate, but it’s a solid alternative to TextMate if you’re not on a Mac.

Stuff I liked

• The basic refactoring support is surprisingly handy. Until I got back the ability to rename classes and methods I hadn’t realized I’d missed it. I’m told that Aptana can perform similar tricks, but it’s been a while since I’ve tried it out.
• Likewise, the ability to jump directly to a class definition is handy, although it isn’t perfect. (If you have more than one class of the same name defined but located in different files or scoped to different modules it can’t figure out which one, exactly, you’re referencing, which I suppose is understandable.)
• RSpec support! A must-have. And the ability to jump back and forth between test and class… most of the time.
• If you’re a Vi user, the jVi plugin is almost worth the price of switching purely on its own. It’s a truly excellent piece of software, with an enormous amount of tweakability and really support for Vi constructs, and one of my complaints with Vim itself has always been that it lacks good project/directory browsing support, and yes, I’ve tried the Project plugin… again and again and again.
• It knows to insert an “end” when I hit enter after a block or method definition. Just a stupid small thing, but I miss it now when I don’t have it.

Stuff I didn’t like

• It opens up a new output window each time you hit Shift-F6 to run a test, leading to a million open output windows after you’ve been using it for a while. This is an enormous pain in the ass, and it’s compounded by the problem of really poor tab management support in the section of the IDE that displays your previous test runs. This is my single biggest complaint.
• The “jump to file” functionality doesn’t insert automatic wildcards the way TextMate does. This drives me absolutely nuts and it’s something I miss desperately.
• Method autocomplete doesn’t work well and is far more trouble than it’s worth. I turn it off almost immediately.
• It does not, and here I am being charitable, have the most attractive design on the face of the planet. I realize that by stating this I am probably slagging the work of some diligent UI designer somewhere, and I realize that you have to work within the constraints of Swing themes across multiple platforms. But it doesn’t stack up well next to the clean design of TextMate, or the brand new, achingly sexy (YMMV) MacVim.

Lessons Learned

• Use a nightly build, and keep it fresh. It’s the only way to get support for stuff like RSpec. The nightly builds have been stable and make for happy funtimes.
• Spin up your dev server on the command line rather than using the builtin server runner. Maybe it’s just me, but using an IDE for this just doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

If you’ve spent any time working with Ruby in NetBeans I’d be curious to hear about it.

Many people can drink and write; there is, in fact, a grand tradition of engaging in both simultaneously. I am not one of those people¹, and have spent much of the last year in this new city, job, and social circle engaged in much of the former and not enough of the latter. Even that cannot suffice to explain my extended absence from blogging; indeed, I must ultimately confess to having surrendered to the shallow charms of sloth. No more! Everything is now deployed, configured, and arranged in more or less the fashion that I desire. I have met the enemy, and he is me, and he is vanquished. Allow me to take a moment and put in an associate cheer for mod_rails.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to finally design my own custom theme. Many good and widely admired technical bloggers use stock or mostly-stock layouts. But it’s my little corner of the internet, and I can stumble blindly around Photoshop as well or better than the next poor sap when the need arises. Folly follows futility, however, with the knowledge that a large proportion of readers will simply consume this content through syndication and never stop to admire the elegant curve of my header, or its tacky nod to Web circa-2.0 fashion. In fact I haven’t even bothered testing it in IE6, and almost certainly never will; I am profoundly, almost fanatically indifferent to legacy browsers, even though their users are, being somewhat behind the technical curve, proportionately far less likely to consume this content through a feed reader and must thus endure my less-than-finely-tuned CSS.

I nonetheless submit that I am part of the solution, not the problem.

Frankly I haven’t tested it in IE7 either. I tried Firefox 3 and Safari 3 and then I got bored and went out for coffee. Either way, expect future blog entries to be more technical and perhaps less baldly narcissistic.

¹ I’m young yet, though, and everybody needs a dream.