YUI’s DataTable is very flexible and allows you to do many things. Making your choices in advance allows you to define your own version of the DataTable and either cast some of those choices or make them more easily accessible according to your taste and preferences. The whole application will look and behave more consistently and, should you want to change anything, many of the changes will be concentrated in just one single place.

Cucumber is a great tool I usually use for BDD in my ruby projects, but yesterday I tried it with Flex, and it was very enjoyable. Here a little example on how to test Flex applications with Cucumber.

There are two languages stirring up the Java World: Clojure and Scala. Clojure a Lisp dialect on the JVM, powerful and pure and the Scala language a tight integration of object and functional programming. Which should you learn?

What happens when one clicks on "Proceed to Checkout" on a website after browsing through their offerings? This is an analysis of the first milliseconds when an HTTPS connection with Amazon is established. A new page is loaded when proceeding to checkout

Here’s the contenders I’ve found so far, for anyone who’s interested.

* BackgroundDrb
* Delayed Job
* Background Job aka BJ
* Spawn
* Workling
* BackgroundFu
* Rufus Scheduler

And here’s some things that might help with the whole “distributed work queue” problem too…

* Sparrow.
* Conveyor
* Beanstalkd

Agile development methods and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model® Integration) best practices are often perceived to be at odds with each other. This report clarifies why the discord need not exist and proposes that CMMI and Agile champions work toward deriving benefit from using both and exploit synergies that have the potential to dramatically improve business performance.

One of the issues I am currently investigating is Agile vs CMMI. The context being that we run an XP team and management would like to be assessed at CMMI "Level 3″. There is a thread currently running on the extremeprogramming yahoo group around the integration of XP and CMMI. I have taken excerpts of the conversation and pasted them below.

Scott Chacon is a Git evangelist and Ruby developer employed at Logical Awesome working on GitHub.com. He is the author of the Git Internals Peepcode PDF as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage and the Git Community Book. Scott has presented at RailsConf, RubyConf, Scotland on Rails, Ruby Kaigi, OSCON and a number of local groups and has done corporate training on Git across the country.

The Ruby based RGen framework provides support for dealing with models and metamodels, for defining model transformations and for generating textual output. It is tightly coupled with the Ruby language as it uses internal DSLs. Following the Ruby design principles, it is lightweight and flexible and supports efficient development by providing means to write concise, maintainable code

RFactor is a Ruby gem that aims to provide automated refactoring support for your favorite text editor. Don't we have IDEs that support refactoring? Yes, but RFactor developer Fabio Kung believes that "most of Ruby developers do not use IDEs" and that a text editor is good enough.