web-frameworks

I read this as evening light reading alongside a much more deliberate Haskell push, and built the whole Depot/Storefront tutorial along the way, with auth, i18n, Action Mailer/Mailbox, and hundreds of fast passing tests. Coming from a mostly JEE/JSF background (with a little Angular thrown in), I expected Rails' “Cadillac, all-bells-and-whistles” reputation to feel dated by 2026. It didn’t. It’s still the batteries-included framework, and the batteries are good ones: a rich text editor built in, which I had to bolt onto my own JEE app; a full email system in both directions, Action Mailer for outgoing with genuinely well-thought-out test-mode delivery support, Action Mailbox for incoming routed like a controller. I don’t expect a web framework to check my email for me, and I’m not sure I’d trust it over something like Mailchimp once you need real deliverability at scale, but as a “we already thought of that” touch I was impressed, and the testing support around it is A+. ...

So, I haven’t been blogging for about ten years. To tell the truth, I spent all day programming, so when I got off work, I spent my time reading history or philosophy or anything else not computer related. I can see from my previous posts that I was experimenting with video and had started reading Agile Web Development with Rails. Well, I’m still a full stack web developer, so I could do worse than looking back at the web framework that really started it all. So I will read Agile Web Development with Rails 8 and get a taste of convention before configuration. That doesn’t really fit with the new title of the blog, but it’s still something I want to do, so I will get it done. I was interested in functional programming and different approaches to web development 10 years ago, and have never fully explored either, so I’m picking up where I left off with a slightly updated approach. ...