Posted by matijs
15/04/2010 at 05h42
You can implement a programming language in assembly. C is an example. This
has the advantage of being able to leave your language and use assembly
when necessary. You drop down to assembly for speed.
You can also implement a programming language in lisp. CLPython is an
example. This has the advantage of being able to leave your language and
use lisp when necessary. You drop down to lisp for expressiveness.
If lisp is the ultimate language, does this not make it the best option for
implementing other languages?
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Posted by matijs
11/04/2010 at 12h22
Because URL shortening services can go away at any time, I decided
to install my own. In the spirit of your-own-dogfood, and to make hacking
it as enjoyable as possible, it had to be in Ruby (this ruled out
YOURLS, which otherwise does exactly what I want). There are tons
of URL shortening projects in Ruby on GitHub. Unfortunately, they all
lacked one feature: password protection for the adding of URLs. In the end,
I picked a nice simple one and changed it to my liking. The result can be
found in my fork of turl.
Why is this safer than using one of the existing services? The reason tr.im
went under is that they couldn't make it pay for itself, and there was a
lot of abuse from spammers. Both problems are absent for my own service: I
don't need to make any money off of it, and I'm the only one who can create
new short URLs.
Some observations on developing this software:
-
For a small project like this, putting everything in one file is very,
very nice. Ramaze allows you to do this (as do other frameworks),
Ruby on Rails does not. I wonder how seamless the transition is if
your project starts small like this and then gradually becomes big enough
that you need to split it into different files.
-
Ramaze's documentation needs some love. Everything is documented well in
principle, but with the split-off of the innate
library, it took me
ages to find the documentation for the a
method and friends.
-
I really like the idea of [Sequel][sq]::Model
where you define the
table schema right in the model. I'm not sure how or how well it works
with migrations, but for a small project like this, it's nice and clean.
-
Ramaze could use some more options for session storage. In particular,
something file-based shouldn't be too much to ask for. I'm using the
LocalMemCache option, and keep having to log in.
I really like Ramaze, and am eager to try Sinatra. I have been
ignoring these more light-weight frameworks for far too long.
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