Bamboo Blog

In the past, there has been a noticeable level of scorn for the "View" part in web-based-MVC architecture. Phrases such as "putting too much logic in the view" are often apt, but can be unhelpful when looking at the bigger picture. This has led to people trying to write UI code/behaviour from the comfort of their area of familiarity - Server code.

The main reason why I believe we ("Server-side" devs) need to rethink this attitude relates to statefulness.

There are several aspects to building javascript UIs, and you need to do a bit of planning beforehand if you want them to be successful. 2010 is set to be the year of Javascript's ascendancy, and you can't ignore it. You also need to start using it properly (if you aren't already). We have evolved beyond the level of chucking event handlers inline in views and it is not possible to just hope for the best as things get more complicated.

Agile decomposes into values, principles and practices. The values are very high level, the practices are day to day implementation, and the principles tie them together. Applying the practices without understanding the principles is a big problem. Unless you prioritise and focus on the principles you believe in, changing your day to day behaviour will not bring the results you want.

There are some fantastic gems and plugins out there for handling images in Rails apps, but there are a number of things which have never seemed quite right with the way they work.

With this in mind, I'm very pleased to introduce Dragonfly, a Rack-based ruby gem for processing/encoding on the fly.

We are proud to announce that New Bamboo is providing our office as the venue for January London Javascript meetup on 21st Jan (Thursday). The night is focused on node.js.