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For giggles I spent an hour this evening and added support for Disque to the pluggable system I help maintain [0].
Things I can say: the ruby disque library isn't really fleshed out yet. It's alpha, so that's fine, but it's got a ways to go. For example, it doesn't directly expose ACKJOB as a command. The server is equally alpha, things like HELP don't do anything yet, and some options on some commands appear broken. But hey, it was a fun way to spend an hour.
As someone who relies heavily on the Ruby ecosystem to do my job day-to-day, this is really interesting. But I can't tell from the site what exactly it's doing. Are the membership "dues" going to fund an individual (André?) or a team to work on this full-time? Part-Time? Can I influence with my membership which projects my money is allocated towards? Will the accounting for the money be published within the "membership"?
As it's presented, I have too many questions to even begin to be able to put this in front of my organization and feel comfortable that what I'm pitching provides good value for the money spent.
> But I can't tell from the site what exactly it's doing.
Here's the idea: companies that rely on Ruby contribute money to a pool. The board of directors authorizes spending money out of that pool. They authorize this money towards supporting core Ruby infrastructure and projects. All of this is through a non-profit, so it's tax deductible for everyone.
> Are the membership "dues" going to fund an individual (André?) or a team to work on this full-time?
At our first board meeting, we approved paying André to work on Bundler and its APIs, as well as Rubygems. We'll see how much money we end up collecting, but we hope to be able to eventually pay several full-time salaries.
> Can I influence with my membership which projects my money is allocated towards?
Each year, a new board will be elected, and they will authorize the nonprofit's spending. A membership gets you a vote in those elections, the next of which is in a year.
> Will the accounting for the money be published within the "membership"?
As a nonprofit, this is a legal requirement, basically.
> Here's the idea: companies that rely on Ruby contribute money to a pool. The board of directors
> authorizes spending money out of that pool. They authorize this money towards supporting core
> Ruby infrastructure and projects. All of this is through a non-profit, so it's tax deductible for
> everyone.
That summary should appear somewhere on the website, as it includes the core of what you're doing much more succinctly than anything I found clicking through the links.
Thanks for the details, and thanks for working to improve the Ruby community!
That's what people missed. YAML is a marshaling format, full stop. The Ruby community has to absorb this idea, and quickly, because YAML is everywhere.
Actually, XMPP the underlying technology we finally decided upon, just before the team fell apart. But the concept was to make a product that is based on it, but with a different feature set from the usual IM/chat clients we see.
So a guy hacks github, he's a hero. A guy hacks a bunch of media organizations, and he's a villain. I really don't understand the groupthink these days.
I agree, the original piece was a decent explanation of how to refactor some helper type code into a more Presenter like model. But he completely skipped out on the question of why it's a useful thing, and when it's a good fit. If that post had been by DHH or another Rails core member, we'd see it instantly picked up into the current cargo-cult trend of the month.
That said, I do appreciate Steve's work on finding ways outside of "the one true path" to simplify Ruby code, and hope he'll continue writing these sorts of things going forward. If nothing else, the discussion surrounding the technique and it's alternatives is extremely worthwhile.
You're a bit off here. Appcelerator doesn't actually compile ANY javascript to native code. They expose a device specific API via a proxy/bridge system they call Kroll. They have a bunch of ObjC code that they then front with their Kroll Proxy. They also have a small shim between their JS interpreter, and Kroll on the other side.
So in effect any app you run on Appcelerator is still bound to the characteristics of their chosen JS interpreter, AND the characteristics of their proxy, AND lastly the performance of their native API.
It does provide a relatively simple path, to getting relatively simple apps up and running with native widgets but not inherently native performance.
Disclaimer: I've only ever dug into the iOS source, I can't swear this is 100% valid on other platforms.
I appreciate your comment, and it's great that you're reaching out to the developers using your platform. I'm excited to try out the debugging features of Titanium Studio, and hopefully it's more transparent in the steps it's taking to build an application as well.
Your second paragraph rings a bit hollow though. I'm sure you all are committed to growing the platform, I'm sure you're making investments. What software company isn't trying to move things forward? But as a user, I frankly don't care about how much better things will be. I just want to get things done, and the current state of your product makes that difficult. Worse than that, the current track-record of development (as witnessed by may comments here!) doesn't show a lot of progress.
I earnestly look forward to seeing improvements in the near future, as I have an application to deploy and support!
Well, we just released Titanium Studio... with debugging. How's that for moving things forward? And sample projects and code are included, with a ton of new features coming in the full release later this quarter.
We have about 2,500 apps being built per month now. This number is increasing by about 50% month over month. In total, we have over 15,000 apps in the various app stores. That puts us as #1 go-to mobile development platform behind Apple and Google. Seriously.
Obviously, we'd love it if everyone was successful, but we're 50 people and running flat out. And that last round of $9M in funding? It's gone to QA, to acquiring Aptana, to adding 5 engineers in the past 6 weeks on Android, to quadrupling the amount of content out there (have you checked out our latest guides? They're awesome! http://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/guides/Home). There's a ton in there... and most have been written by the community!
Look, I'm not saying that we're perfect. We have LOTS to do. But we're a platform company that's listening intensely to developer needs on a very frequent basis and making big investments in the areas that need the most help.
So, yeah, Q&A needs a forum. Our API needs more parity, we certainly need to be more responsive to the 100 or so questions coming at us every day. But c'mon, if you're going to build a real native app in no time, a platform that has 3,600 methods and processes in use by 130,000 active app developers must have something going for it don't you think? Try Wunderlist. Try GetGlue. Try ScoutMob. These are all top apps written on Titanium with small dev teams. None of these apps were built with a support subscription, btw. Stick with it and you'll see just how much can be done with the platform.
Give us another shot with Titanium Studio and the other cool stuff that comes out this quarter. We'd love to see you back as a Titanium fan...
Thanks for letting us know some of the backstory there.
It may be just me, but reading your comment makes me more worried about lack of focus there than less... It just seems very frenetic.
I've been developing on Titanium for several months now (as a paid subscriber) and more and more the decisions and priorities of the company really puzzle me. It seems like Appcelerator mostly ignores a shaky foundation while excitedly piling more 'features' on top of it and using tons of duct tape to try and keep it from collapsing before the money runs out.
The most compelling evidence for this is the pull requests being ignored for long periods of time. How can we be excited about a platform that is so slow to even accept help from the open source community to improve it? Meanwhile, I frequently get calls from Appcelerator trying to get me to buy in-person training and even a new 'certification' program. Really?! That's where your putting your resources rather than the actual platform supporting your 'platform'?
I really really want to like Titanium and be a fan, but right now it seems like asking me to please be a Microsoft fan. At this point I'd probably recommend MS over Ti. That's not a compliment :(
Please please please focus on your core experience. Ignoring it will drastically damage your reputation among hackers (as you can already see happening) - and hackers are the ones who decide which platforms to use (and which to abandon).
I would gladly pay several times more than I am now for an 'A' quality platform. Money is not an issue for many of us developers, but quality will be the deal killer here. I've many times wished that I could even pay a bounty to fix certain platform bugs.
We demand convenience in all facets of life, Uber with transportation or OpenTable with reservations, the liquor store should not be different. A Drizly delivery brings the liquor store to you in 30-60 minutes, right from your smartphone.
We have several openings for Senior Engineers on the Backend, Frontend and Mobile.
Apply at: https://jobs.lever.co/drizly or email me tanner@drizly.com and mention Hacker News.
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