a weblog by Railsways.com

Honestly, I hate to fill in paper form, and working on MS Word and Excel forms sucks. I also don’t know why people like to create forms in Word or Excel format. I hate to fill in paper form since primary school. At the beginning of each school year, you have to fill in numerous forms, from application for the student cards to application for the student travel card. You have to read a lot of information before you can filled in the form. I still remember that so many times when I just filled in some information and then I found that I just put it in the wrong field! Sorry no delete button.

Word and Excel Form are usually Poorly Design

Truth be told, most forms in Enterprise are poorly designed or don’t have design at all. These forms are usually created by executives, these forms are created to fullfil those executives need  to collect whatever informations they like. Those forms are not design to at users standpoint. But the most important problem is that Word and Excel are not suitable to design form for user to input.

What’s wrong with Word and Excel

1. People like to use underline character as the “grid line”, so when you try to type in something, those “grid line” move while you are typing.

2. Those cell in Excel are too short, the information you type in usually span into multiple cell making those “Form” unreadable.

3. Many people like to print out the form and fill in by hand and then submit. Your printer driver and setting will affect the print out, those wrong margin will make your 1 page form into 2 pages one.

I just don’t think Word and Excel is a good tool for both design and fill in form. PDF is a good option, but people seldom use it right, PDF form allows us to design form in e.g. Word or Excel and export it to PDF,  and then use acrobat (not acrobat reader) to design the input field. The problem of the PDF solution is that, you have to design the form twice, once for design the layout, the other for design the input field. The main problem is many people don’t know they can use acrobat reader to input the form and submit it via email. They just print out the form and fill in by hand. Many tree was killed because the stupidity of those PHB.

There Should be a Better Form Solution

Stay tuned, we are developing a solution for that. If you want to keep updates, you can join our mailing list here.

The folks at Phusion had put out a new version of Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7, 1.8.7 is more compatible to ruby 1.9 than 1.8.6, also the rubygems had upgraded to version 1.3.5.  This version has been beta tested by the Twitter guys, 37signals guys, and those people at Novell. Evan Weaver reported significant improvements in Twitter’s throughput after having switched to this REE release.

This is the first REE target to compatible with ruby 1.8.7, the exact version is ruby 1.8.7-p174, all previous REE versions are target to compatible with ruby 1.8.6. As the development of Rails 3.0 is going well, we will need a new ruby version for the upcoming release. Rails 3.0 required at least ruby version 1.8.7, so this is a move to ruby 1.8.7. Mac OSX snow leopard comes with ruby 1.8.7 out of the box. Most version of Linux also shipped with ruby 1.8.7, but not quite true for RHEL.

RHEL5 comes with ruby 1.8.5, that’s ok for a 2 year old distribution, but for the upcoming RHEL6, which probably based on fedora 10/11, which shipped with ruby 1.8.6. This version of REE is time saver for those people on RHEL. Come on Redhat guys, give us a more updated version of Ruby please!

If you planned to install this version of REE on snow leopard, make sure you run the installer with --no-tcmalloc switch.

P.S. we will probably got an update version of Agile Web Development with Rails around Christmas, and all those examples in version 4 of the pickaxe book will be working on Ruby 1.9.2. If I have a new Rails project to start, I’ll probably pick version 1.9.