Java has been good to web developers over the past few years. Through the use of the Servlet API released by Sun, developers could include Java code in JavaServer Pages. Dynamic web pages for sites like catalog retailers flourished.

I worked on one of those for a few years, mostly as a system administrator. My introduction to Solaris came by way of the IT department’s VP, who suggested I use my next three weeks to learn how to admin Solaris 2.6.

My skills on the web side were mostly HTML and Perl. I learned enough about JSP and Servlets to help developers debug those on occasion, and alter existing ones to do new things. Thankfully, Vim was up to the challenge. (Aside to people who get to use Eclipse these days: I’m not jealous of you. Really.)

Author Bruce Tate and Ruby on Rails have grown into what looks like the next best thing when it comes to a framework for developing web applications. Tate discussed this in his article on dynamically typed languages, on IBM’s developerWorks website.

“Ruby templates rely on simple capabilities in the language to provide a simple but effective approach for Web page development,” said Tate. “You can rapidly understand Ruby templates by grasping a few layered concepts, with each layer more powerful than the last.”

Every template starts with a string, which is a first-class object in Ruby. Tate noted that data does not pass through a string enclosed by single quotes. With double quotes, Ruby does the substitution pass through the string, as Tate showed in a basic newline character example.

From there the developer can move on to simple variable substitutions, and crafting simple templates. “The ability to include simple coding structures, such as looping for tables with dynamic data, forms the backbone of most dynamic Web pages,” said Tate.

Filters on the web server process the Ruby files and turn embedded code into useful output, similar to the way JSP is handled by an application server of choice. The filter can be plugged into an Apache server installation, and used to invoke Ruby web pages.

A solid community of Ruby on Rails users can help developers learn more about using Ruby for web applications, and details about Ruby the language may be found online.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

I know some people swear by Vim, but I could never get into it. Maybe I have a weird version of it, but I just can’t move fast enough with it, due to different keyboard shortcuts than what I’m used to.

Still, Google snaps up another well-known engineer. Next up: Google hires the inventor of those magnetic ribbons. Damn ribbons

Well, Google did hire an Israeli university student and acquired his text search algorithm, beating out Yahoo and Microsoft for the guy. Ori Alon, a student at the University of New South Wales in Australia. had developed Orion, which attempts to determine the most accurate set of results and displays a list of topics related to the original source.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.

For the duration of the Vim project, Moolenaar has accepted sponsorships and donations to help support his work on Vim. He also encouraged users of Vim to donate to the ICCF Holland fund; that fund supports volunteer work in Kibaale, located in Uganda’s south, a place with the highest HIV infection rate in the world according to ICCF.

Now that Moolenaar has accepted a position with Google, he announced how the sponsorships and donations Vim users provide after the end of March will benefit ICCF:

Those who have paid for Vim in the past have been able to vote for features they felt Moolenaar should develop in Vim. That practice will continue after March 31st, the only difference being the donations will go to ICCF Holland instead of him.

Moolenaar also noted version 7 of Vim will enter beta testing shortly.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The Linux colorizing fouls things up royally. You can shut off command line colorizing by editing /etc/DIR_COLORS and changing “COLOR ttty” to “COLOR none” or (less drastically) by removing the “TERM ansi” line from the same file (which removes colorization for ansi but doesn’t affect console use).

But that still leaves vi messing things up. The fix for that is to add

set t_Co=2

to the top of /etc/vimrc. I attempted to do this in ~/.vimrc but couldn’t make it work, and also tried

if &term=="ansi"
&nbsp set t_Co=2
endif

in /etc/vimrc but that didn’t work either.. not sure why yet. The idea there would be to let vim colorize if not using ansi, though in my case forcing it is fine because I don’t want colors in vi ever.

I have seen the suggestion to “set syntax off”; that didn’t work for me or the customer.

To my mind, colorizing is pretty messed up..

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com