John Topley’s Weblog

I booked some train tickets the other day using Qjump and was shocked by the colour choices in their user interface. They’re using some funky JavaScript in the text fields in the Quick Timetable section on the left of the page. It highlights the text you entered in light green on a white background! Check it out:

—I’d hate to see the clothes worn by whoever was responsible for that!

Carson Systems have just launched Vitamin, which is billed as “a resource for Web designers, developers and entrepreneurs”. I’ve just had a quick look around the site and it looks like it’s going to be essential reading if you’re at all interested in Web design or the whole Web 2.0 thing (whatever that is!) There are certainly some heavyweights involved including David Heinemeier Hansson, Eric Meyer and Dave Shea, which bodes well for lots of high-quality content.

I’ve briefly met Ryan Carson and spent a little time talking to Gillian in the pub after the Rails workshop last month. I was struck by how passionate and approachable they both are, and also by how successful they’ve been at getting industry leaders to support their numerous projects. It’s great to see them adding Vitamin to the fold. Best of all, it’s free!

Allan Odgaard over on the TextMate blog writes about a neat shell script that can be used to extract passwords from the OS X keychain. I only wish I had time to learn the shell properly. I’m probably using about one percent of its power right now.

As you can see I’m finally back in the blogging business, after ten months on sabbatical! What an earth have I been up to in all that time? On the positive side, I’ve moved house, gone on holiday to Cuba, acquired a lovely cat named George, bought lifetime Web-hosting and fallen in love with Ruby on Rails. On the negative side, I lost my father to cancer. Life goes on, but it will never be the same for me again. I’m not quite the same person as I was before the 6th February 2006, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I have a new sense of purpose in life.

The observant amongst you will have noticed that I’ve redesigned this site too. And yes, that guy in the top right-hand corner is me—it was a caricature that was done in Cuba. Not only has this place got a new look, but the stuff behind the scenes is new for me too. I’ve abandoned CityDesk and am now using WordPress, because the convenience of being able to run this blog with nothing more than a Web browser and a decent Internet connection was too great to resist.

I put my original blog (2003–2005) in a time capsule where it’s available as part of this site. I did it that way because—

• I didn’t much fancy spending hours importing all the old content and getting it to look right.
• I put a lot of work into it and wanted to preserve it just how it was.

I still have the same day job and still spend it wrestling with J2EE, although I now recognise it for the bloated, tedious and over-engineered behemoth that it is. So if you’ve been holding out all this time for the conclusion of the “Jakarta Struts De-Mystified” series then I’m afraid you’re out of luck. You’ll just have to look over the source code I provided and read some of the other Struts tutorials out there. Ruby on Rails has made developing Web applications a pleasurable experience for me for the first time. I haven’t felt this excited about a development environment since I first tried Delphi 1.0, which was probably a decade ago actually. If you’re a frustrated Web application developer I urge you to check Rails out. Struts does nothing for you in comparison.

So enamoured am I with Rails that I recently attended the Carson Workshops one-day event on the framework, which was very enjoyable and educational. It was great meeting all those like-minded people. I shall be attending the workshop being held by CSS and markup God Eric Meyer next month, so if you’re going to that I’ll see you there!