Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

I’m upgrading a project from Rails 2.0.2 to Rails 2.1.

This thing uses Comatose 0.8.1. Unfortunately, Comatose 0.8.1 isn’t compatible with Rails 2.1. Fine, I’ll just upgrade to Comatose 2.0 (uber-alpha) and that’ll work. Oops, Comatose 2.0 uber-alpha breaks Rails migrations. Fixing that breakage requires a patch to Rails itself.

Oh and did I mention that this project of mine also requires a patch to Comatose proper (adds before_filters to the Comatose configuration object).

So I need a patched version of Comatose and a patched version of Rails. “OK” you say, just use Piston to manage those vendor branches. Not so fast. Piston only works with Subversion and the Rails project is no longer hosted on a Subversion repository. The old repository was deprecated after Rails 2.0.2. Rails is now hosted on Github. Oh and so is Comatose.

Never fear, Github support for Piston is coming Real Soon Now™. Until then I’m stuck in limbo. I suppose I’ll do the manual vendor branch thing—essentially manage my own private Subversion repositories for Rails and Comatose.

The fact that François Beausoleil is implementing Piston support for all-Git projects leads me to believe that there is no convenient alternative (to Piston) for vendor branches in Git. Hum, that’s hard to believe. Anyhow, I can’t migrate this project to Git yet so all-Git alternatives are sort of moot.

Douglas Crockford, purveyor of the JSONRequest spec, is cranky in a polite sort of way. He also happens to be right! Check out the video of his recent talk on The State of AJAX.

Crockford takes us through a brief history of computing reminding us, as we’ve been reminded before, that the Web interaction model is practically the same as the mainframe 3270 interaction model circa 1972.

The most potent moment in the talk however, is when he shows a shot of a mermaid rendered via a run of the mill nvidia subsystem and dryly points out “look, rounded corners”. The upshot: the 1984 Macintosh had rounded corners — browsers were obsolete from the git go and there is a huge and widening gap between what you do in a web app and what you do in a non-web one.

Oh and I’m making Crockford my Personal Hero of the Month for pointing out that not only are our web technologies based on eight-year-old standards (HTML 4.0.1, ECMAscript ed. 3, CSS 3 um… started in ‘98 and still under development) but that of those, CSS is the worst of the lot and should be replaced with urgent haste. Refreshing respite from the usual CSS love.

“Don’t take any crap.”

update: watch this space for my growing list of web standards revolutionaries:

When I made this jyte claim a couple weeks ago (May 15, 2007) I believed it based solely on my personal experience of using web apps every day:

A backlash is brewing against traditional thin-client web applications. Folks are tired of the beachball. Vendors of Web-based applications like Gmail, in which users spend a significant portion of their day, will respond by incorporating client-side persistence, offline operation and synchronization. In particular Gmail will add these features in 2007.

Well then a couple days ago (May 30, 2007), Google announced Google Gears , their toolkit for offline web apps (connection detection, offline operation, offline storage) and updated Reader with an offline mode. This thing is similar in purpose to Joyent’s Slingshot which went into Beta on the Mac on April 17, 2007.

It sure seems like the stage is set. Technology answers need. Only thing standing in the way might be competing priorities or strategic conflicts. Have to think about that a little bit.