21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code Great Ruby tips here. Keeping this open in a browser tab and trying to use the tips throughout the week.

XMLMate TextMate plugin: “Check XML and XHTML documents for Well-Formedness and Validity while editing them in TextMate with support for DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron, XInclude, XML Catalog, and XPath 2.0 Visualizer.”

Elements of Design Great collection of web design elements but together by Christian Watson. Great for inspiration.

Rails Widgets Nice Rails plugins to assist in creating navigation bars, tabs, tooltips, show/hide toggling, and tableizer.

After further thought and consideration, I retract my statement that HTML should never be sent back to an AJAX request. There was a reason I made that statement, however I can’t fill you in on it yet (hint: I have to wait for a future software release). But, even with that reason, I have no issue with using HTML in an AJAX response. I wrongly applied a wise and fully correct architectural principle, which I will elaborate on in a future post, to the AJAX situation.

Hopefully at some point in the future, I can go into more detail on why I first wrongly concluded that this should never be done. Until then, rest assured, I will use whatever format fits the circumstance (JSON, HTML, XML).

I still believe that Java is ideal for the back end portion of a web site or Internet application. When I say “back end”, I am referring to the data manipulation including the use of business rules and data persistence.

Its the use of Java on the front end, the web gui, that I’m not so sure I’m convinced of at this point. When JSP first came out, it seemed so simple, but then we began to get so concerned over separating roles and markup, content, and logic. Now creating a web site is just too much work. Lately, I’ve been using Word Press to do my blogs, and using Open Reports to create a reporting web site. Both of these are great examples of the simplicity in creating web sites. Open Reports creates forms to fill out with a simple web gui interface. Both of them require no “coding” in order to add further pages, change the look and feel, etc. They aren’t as custom as would be needed for most of the web applications I’ve worked on, but, I think we should be able to get to a point where the web front end is as simple as using Word Press, Open Reports, or any of the other CMS type web tools.

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