Thursday, September 11, 2008

Secret to a Developer's Success

In a interview with LinuxDevCenter.com, Matz was asked the "future plans for Ruby", he replied:

loop do
read and reply mails
write code
write document/article/book
write code
end

I think this is an excellent plan to succeed for a developer who is passionate about software development.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Integrate ActiveMerchant With Rails

I read the Integrate ActiveMerchant With Rails recipe in the book Enterprise Rails Recipes by Maik Schmidt. This recipe is basically a recipe for disaster.

In a real web application the user must be taken out of the loop as soon as possible. Having a spinner spining or disabling the button or saying don't click the button is a bad design. Take Amazon for instance the user experience on the site is a good example to follow.

As soon as you create an order, you must set it's initial state and process that order in the background. You can use run rake task using a CRON job that processes the orders. What happens if the Gateway is down? What will you recover from network errors? These things happen in the real world and your software that affect the bottom line must be able to handle it.