I read a lot of things these days that describe "Web 2.0" applications.

A lot of these sounds like rants that George Carlin does in which he (very impressively) strings together a suprising number buzzwords that surround a given topic.

Something thing I've quietly been up to is taking a bit of time to learn Rails. Not Ruby in its full depth, but enough to understand it in the scope of what pieces you'd use to deliver a Rails app.

Hi all,

Looks like someone linked to this again - comments have been popping up all day.

Microsoft "Silverlight" popped up this morning, a "cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

Looking at Silverlight's home page, I first thought it was something new. Digging deeper, I found it's .NET and XAML. Oh, OK, WPF/E.

Anyhow, I tried to watch the video. They've got the phrase "cross-browser, cross-platform" plastered everywhere, but I could only get it to play on my PC, and that's after a string of codec downloads and WMP updates. SSDD at MSFT.

This started out as a long comment on Brian Kotek's recent post about the ActiveRecord pattern. I figure that while I've still got some Rails-ish types irked at me, I may as well go ahead and blog a bit more about why I don't like the datacentricness of the ActiveRecord approach.

Before you fire up your flame generation script, let me say this: ActiveRecord is super-productive when you need to allow someone to edit a relational model. It doesn't, however, suit the kind of OOD-backed development I do. This post is about why.

So, what's with the guy who put together the MG:U stack calling this stuff backwords for something he pushes (OO)? I'm not writing this to start a flame war: I'm writing this because I'd like people to think about the tools they're using and the appropriate contexts for their use, and I chose a bit of an inflammatory title to get you to click. :)

There's an article over at AjaxWorld magazine about why Ajax is so "distruptive" in that it changes the playing field for normal software development. I think the first part of the article is great: it talks about how "Web 2.0" sites don't need to have Ajax, and how Ajax is encouraging better Web software design by encouraging developers/architects to write their applications as APIs.