Check out Cris R’s photostream  on Flickr.

Web standards are in our DNA and will always be a core part of our editorial focus. Standards fans, never fear. We will not abandon our post. But since late 2005, we have consciously begun steering ALA back to its earliest roots as a magazine for all people who make websites—writers, architects, strategists, researchers, and yes, even marketers and clients as well as designers and developers. This means that, along with issues that focus on new methods and subtleties of markup and layout, we will also publish issues that discuss practical and sometimes theoretical aspects of user experience design, from the implications of ubiquitous computing to keeping communities civil.

Bravo! 3 cheers for architects; 3 cheers for developers; 3 cheers for strategists.

That makes 9 cheers from people like me – an architect/developer/strategist.

What about you? Are you adjusting your web standards strategy during the browser battles of 2008? How are you maturing your business? Are your branches growing stronger, as your roots grow deeper?  Are you growing old gracefully, like the old oak tree?

Ruby on Rails - Architecture

Ruby on Rails Architectural Diagram – from Niwatori image-photo-stream on Picasa

Watering Hole at London Festival of Architecture 2008

Dome Window on the Roof

Dome – stained glass window on the roof – from garydenness photosream on Zooomr

“You might imagine that somewhere in a back room at conferences the old hands at microprocessor architecture get together over dinner and a few bottles of wine–the sort that must be concealed in expense reports–lean back in their chairs, and talk long into the night about lessons learned and lessons repeated.”

Setting the tone, Nick Tredennick characterized the industry has having been “fooled by randomness.” Architecture is not a science, he argued, because it has only self-validation. “An architect creates a new architecture, and then we let him tell us about all its advantages and conceal all its problems.”

“When people of this caliber get together, some profound thoughts precipitated out of the levity. And given the diversity of experience on the panel, their observations were remarkably consistent. Taken together, they could almost form a little handbook of how to, and not to, do a CPU architecture.”

Smart and Sophisticated

“People in your time,” Evelyn had interrupted flippantly, “were wise and good. Nobody wants to be wise and good in these days. We want to be smart and sophisticated. Your good old stuffy dining-rooms were like your good old stuffy consciences. Now my breakfast room is symbolic — the green and white for the joy of living, and the black for my sins.”

From page 96, in the book “Mistress Anne”, by Temple Bailey, published by The Penn Publishing Company, 1917

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

The video is kind of funny, and does reveal some tidbits of truth about the complexity of enterprise java development. But those who have been reading about Ruby and JRuby for a while realize that you can run Ruby and Ruby On Rails with Java.

But if you think about it… guess that goes to show you there’s a-lotta-truth here.

1. the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
2. Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
3. Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

So, Thin is the new dog in town. Did I mention that Thin is fast and flexible?

Thank-you Marc Cournoyer !