Getting there. Rails finally gets conditional GET. Bad pun, what can I say. It’s still horribly verbose by Ruby standards, and does nothing useful for PUT request, but progress it is. Maybe by year-end I’ll be able to deprecate if_modifed.
Illegal to pirate free code. While everyone believes open source licenses mean something, we finally got a court ruling stating they do:
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer.
I find it slightly ironic that you can pirate free code, but legally open source needs this win.
Cheers. Something good is happening at ECMA. ECMAScript 4 — JavaScript, to the rest of the world — is going to have less features than originally proposed:
Some ECMAScript 4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding. This conclusion is key to Harmony.
…
This means a couple things: First, you can forget a lot of what you learned about ECMAScript 4, previously. Many of the complicated concepts contained in the language have been tossed. Instead there is a considerable amount of effort going in to making sure that new features will be easily duplicable through other means.
LaunchPad Chicken. Jean-Louis Gassée on the Mobile “Works for Me” debacle:
Picture the NASA control room before the launch of an expedition to the Moon. … In the huge air-conditioned control room, five of these men are sweating, something’s not quite right with their baby. The temperature keeps rising, the pressure is falling, the telemetry link is weakening. Almost but not quite in the red zone. If the parameters keep drifting like this, they’ll have to pick up the red phone. But who wants to be the one who aborts the launch? So, they sweat some more and hope someone else blinks first. There you have it: Launchpad Chicken.
Design corner. Top ten Web typography sins.
At least the Rails core is noticing Conditional GET, but I think your if_modified plugin is still important, and has a far nicer API than this new one built into Rails. Now they just need to discover Conditional PUT and Conditional DELETE, which aren’t widely used, but extremely useful.
Thanks.
I added a comment on Github suggesting an if_modified method would be easier to understand then the boilerplate Ruby code currently required by this patch.
Next up hill battle: give if_modified the object and let it set etag/last-modified by itself.