Iteration's Over

4 days of mayhem. Sleepless nights and total work. Now I understand what a 'working professional' feels like. Most of the problems where HTML based. We, me and Amit, did all we could, from fixing HTML to Functional and Unit testing. Even after having worked so hard, we got errors during the demo. These errors were quickly sorted out, but pressurized us. But all that is well, ends well (I am a pessimist by the way).

Ruby On Rails coding has been great up until now. Yesterday I had a party along with Vivek, Rohan, Abhilash, Abhijat and Amit, and then Vivek told me the problem he faced when a query fired via find_by_sql took 5 secs to execute. He tells that the query is a simple one with a where clause, no 'in' statements, but fetches 20000 odd records. The same query run via php-myadmin runs in .00x odd secs. Is the Active Record a bad ORM then? I also find many people stating that not using the Active Record in Rails will solve a whole lot of problems.

It was also interesting to find that the ':include' option in 'find' will return you the object to which it has Foreign Key - Primary Key relationship. But it doesnot work if there is a select clause. But why ? If i have a credit table and a user table, then I cant write a find statement, with :include, which gives me the credit amount and the user data? It is a join at the end of the day and the populated stuff, which I understand is bad, could be populated along with the user hash too. This is also the case if I iterate through an array with records which were fetched with along with a select statement. Could not decide if this were logical.

We also put some validations along with the code. Live Validation was introduced to me for the first time and I loved it. I also understand there is a RoR plug-in for this which directly hooks up to the model and then writes its own Javascript code according to the validations given at the model level. Thats just 'WOW' !

I out of ideas as it has been a long time now that I have written something.

But as Arnie says 'I'll Be Back !'

Hectic Schedule

The last 2 days just took the juice from me. After the Workstreamr 0.1 iteration, the focus was towards getting the initial page in html just right. I am a great believer in doing things accurately the first time around so that even if there are changes we would have to do a lot of them. The usage of only divs as the components were one of them. And Joydeep found it very hard to design the html in that way. We fixed a lot of issues, including the floating divs, the problems with the 'IE' engine. And the result looks great. It has all the ingredients which makes a great web application.

The developers in Workstreamr have also done a great job. To look at a working product, even though it has not finished, is a great sight. The processes followed, which by the way I never followed before, is great. Its a little tedious, but worth the time. I still have to get used to logging my work !! Javascript is the core area in this project and I feel the Object Oriented aspects of Javascript should be implemented more consistently.

But the new role, even if the 'official role' does not change works great for me. I like to visualize stuff and thats what I am doing here. Suggesting ideas, listening to new stuff and trying to implement them. For me it doesn't matter if I log work because I develop anyway and the people I talk to know what I am about.

We had a pizza party today and reflected on the great things that happened. Appreciated all the team members, from HR to me. I consider that this is a very important thing to do. This boosts the morale of the team members. More over it generates the feeling of oneness.

The next week would also be pretty hectic as the html has to go in for integration along with other stuff. The rest of the html must be implemented. Javascript must be written. I dont know how Abhijat, Abhilash and Rohan do it !! Kudos to them.