Seth Ladd's Blog

My buddy Anthony collected some of his Thoughts About Work . Good list. I wanted to add two more. * Surround yourself with people you can learn from and have fun with. * Share both your successes and failures with your team. Everyone can learn from both.

Thinking about OpenID , the next step is obviously a way to integrate trust into an identity. The first question people will want to ask, I believe, is, "Is this person a spammer?" (Insert your own definition for spammer here, but typically this will mean "Will this person use this site/application/service for the originally intended purpose and will abide by the policies and rules of the site/application/serivce?") Now that it seems like everyone is getting on board with OpenID (AOL, digg, Technorati, LiveJournal, even Microsoft), there are a lot of identities swimming around. This is a Good Thing. However, nothing stops a spammer or Bad Guy from creating their own OpenID. This is also a Good Thing, because OpenID is only there to verify the identity. Other technologies and layers are then free to add in Trust. There's a lot of built up trust information out on the web if we can just get to it. Think about all the hard earned feedback profiles and rankin...

Henry Story has a great rundown on JSR-311: a Java API for RESTful Web Services? . Lots of links for REST APIs and implementations and frameworks for Java. Is a REST framework for Java even needed? I think a better Servlet and HTTP library would serve a better purpose, allowing Java to be more RESTful while at the same time making programming HTTP easier and more explicit.

Luke Redpath makes a valiant attempt to DRY up RESTful Rails controllers as he writes Refactoring REST: searching for an abstraction . I can see how this can be very useful if your controller methods follow the simple paths. Good to see some implementation patterns emerge that build on the assumptions that your controller is RESTful.

Sit back, enjoy, and get pumped up for building web applications again.

My buddy Anthony Eden is presenting at RailsConf 2007 . He'll be talking about Data Warehouses on Rails with ActiveWarehouse . I'm currently building a Data Warehouse fronted by Rails, and some of the code I've written has ended up in ActiveWarehouse . It's a really interesting project, and I hope to see it bring data warehousing into every application. I'll be at the talk, hope to see you there!

I just figured out how to handle collections of unsaved ActiveRecord objects in XHTML forms rendered by Ruby on Rails, so I thought I'd share with the hopes of making the next person's search a bit quicker. Note: This post assumes you have Rails 1.2 and are generally following RESTful principles and are using `map.resources`. The main concepts work without `map.resources` but you'll have to tweak some of the URLs. The problem: You have a collection of unsaved (new) ActiveRecord objects that you would like to render fields for in the same form. For instance, you want to let a user enter multiple phone numbers before they initially save the User object and its collection of PhoneNumber instances. Solution: Turns out, Rails makes this pretty easy (but of course) but the hard part is just figuring out how. We'll assume you have a controller method that initializes the user and a phone number. We'll start with a single phone number just to make things easy. [sour...