Thursday

• allyn
• July 31st, 2008
• 03:35:37 PM

So, today is Thursday. Since I missed my Thursday and Friday posts last week, I’m doing them this week. It actually worked out pretty well like that, although after Friday I’ll have to think up a new scheme to find titles for my posts.

Today has gone decently. I’m working on refining the search on a specific part of our site, and it’s getting complicated. I fondly remember yesterday around this time when Dusty suggested I implement these changes, and I said “Ok, but that’s going to take a while.” He responded with something like ‘Oh, it won’t take that long’. I disagreed, and here we sit. A full 24 hours later and I’m not even close to being done.

Dusty: 0
Allyn : 1

What I’m trying to do is essentially teach SQL the same sort of inheritance many modern languages have. ActiveRecord doesn’t do this kind of inheritance right now, but it does do single table inheritance. Single Table inheritance is nice because it reduces the amount of joins one must do on a query, thus letting the query operate a bit faster. That’s all well and dandy, but we’re using Ruby here - the whole concept of which is to make things as easy for the programmer as possible, speed be damned*. I’m not fond of single table inheritance for this situation. I’d really like class inheritance, because I really don’t like the idea of having properties of a subclass in the table of it’s parent. By don’t really like, I mean to say hate with a passion. Anywho, the first one is easy, but the second one is anything but trivial.

Other then that little issue, the day has gone pretty well. Tonight there’s a shingding at a local bar-thing. I’m not that excited about the bar-thing itself, but hopefully the company will be entertaining.

* While this may be true, the reality of course is that we’re making a website, and the interwebs is the land of impatience. Thus, Robert and I are in fact quite concerned with the speed of our application.