malvasia bianca

I’ve finally finished converting dbcdb from Java to Ruby. I’ve been using the Ruby version of the tool to write the database for about four months, but I’d still been using the Java version to write the web pages.

Nothing too deep going on here; I was actually done with everything but the indexes as of the middle of September, but I hadn’t gotten around to generating the indexes until this weekend. (Or do people prefer that I spell it ‘indices’?) We’ve been busy with some extra event every single weekend for about the last two months; combining that with wanting to learn Japanese, working through Metroid and Picross, and occasionally working on the game with Miranda means that, unless I’m feeling extraordinarily disciplined, dbcdb falls by the wayside. But we had nothing planned this weekend, so I seized the opportunity.

The new code is a little more than half as long; the acceptance tests also run almost twice as fast. (All that JVM startup takes time, I guess? I don’t think there are significant algorithmic performance variations in the two versions.) Go Ruby, though I’m sure it would be very easy to find situations where the performance goes the other way. Both generate the exact same output, as manifested by running the same acceptance tests on both versions and on, ultimately, doing a diff -r on both outputs from the current live database contents.

What next? There are some cosmetic tweaks I may or may not get around to making; I’m not feeling any urgency on that score right now. I had planned to next convert this from generating static web pages offline to generating them dynamically via mod_ruby; now I’m feeling distinctly less interested in that idea. (Partly because the REST book reminded me of some of the benefits of static web pages, ironically.) I still want to experiment with that at some point, but now I’m thinking I’ll just do that by coming up with a Rails project instead of doing everything from scratch.

So it looks like it might be time to declare this a success and move on. And it has been a success, no question: I’ve brushed up on my Java a bit, dabbled with SQL, learned Ruby, and basically enjoyed myself. So, from a purely didactic standpoint, I’m quite happy.

There is one thing that I’m not happy with, though. I’d originally envisioned the generated web pages as actually being useful in that they’d provide an index into my blog posts: they would give an easy way for people to find all the web pages where I write about a given game, say. And they do provide an index, but it’s not as easy as I’d like: people have to click on the link to the database and then click from there to a search link, and that’s expecting quite a bit from my readers. (Especially since there’s honestly nothing of particular interest on the database web page itself.)

So I’d like to remove one of those links, to compress it down to one level. In this AJAX-aware world, the mechanisms for doing that are pretty well-trodden: write some JavaScript to do the query in the background, and then stick the results in the database web page. And, in fact, it turns out that WordPress can generate an RSS feed of query results, so I don’t have to worry about page scraping and having details change as I upgrade my WordPress installation. (Which I should really do one of these days – I’m still on 2.0…)

One last task, then. Which is made a bit harder than it would otherwise be by the fact that I don’t know how to write JavaScript, I’m not familiar with the DOM model (if indeed that’s the right term to use), and I don’t know how to acceptance test AJAX. But I’m not particularly worried about either of these: like I said, this is a well-trodden path, so it shouldn’t be very hard to find examples that do pretty much exactly what I want to do.