Archive for January, 2008

Is Delphi Dead? No.

Monday, January 14th, 2008

A few months ago Alex Miller pointed me to this Delphi doom article (the site appears to be down at the moment), which reminded me to post about the same topic. Here goes.
Delphi shipped in 1995, and its demise has been declared frequently since 1997 or so. In a sense this demise is true, yet […]

Optimize Hierarchy Queries with a Transitive Closure Table

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Last year I posted about the use of a Joe Celko-style nested set hierarchy representation, for fast hierarchy queries. Here I will describe another approach which is simpler to query, but more wasteful of space. I did not invent this transitive closure approach, I learned of it from several directions:

Celko wrote about it as […]

Shoes, a new Ruby GUI toolkit

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Last year I gave a talk on Ruby GUI toolkits, and concluded that none of those I looked at were compellingly slick or mature. There is a new player on the field now (thus certainly not mature, but interesting nonetheless): Shoes, from why the lucky stiff.
Shoes creates native applications with a Web feel. It is […]