Peter Cooper Page 32 : Ruby Inside

PoolParty: One Ruby Gem = Easy EC2 Computing Cloud

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By Peter Cooper / June 6, 2008

Pool Party is a new tool by Ari Lerner (of ProcessorPool fame) that makes it easy to automate the deployment, monitoring (using monit), persistent storage (using S3Fuse), and load balancing (using HAProxy) of EC2 instances. While intended to be application agnostic, there’s naturally a major slant towards Ruby applications in general, with support for Rake tasks a core feature.

Ari’s announcement blog post gives more in-depth details. Development is taking place on Github (where the README is somewhat more readable than with RDoc!) along with discussions at a Google group.

Ari presented PoolParty at RailsConf last week, and his slides are available to view below (or at Scribd):

Microsoft’s Latest Bad Idea? ARAX – Ruby-powered AJAX

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By Peter Cooper / June 6, 2008

Microsoft’s got plans for Ruby beyond the fine IronRuby project in the shape of “ARAX” (Asynchronous Ruby and XML), a Ruby-flavored variety of the popular AJAX Web development techniques. Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin will be able to process and run Ruby code that’s directly within Web pages similar to how browsers process JavaScript. This allows Ruby developers to write Ruby code instead of the equivalent JavaScript as they do now.

eWeek interviewed John Lam, creator of and program manager for IronRuby, to find out more about the project. Lam seems to feel that Ruby developers aren’t happy with using multiple languages and dealing with context shifts:

[A]t some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself. Read More

Ruby 1.8.7 Released: Enumeration Object Support Backported From 1.9

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By Peter Cooper / June 2, 2008

With all the excitement surrounding RailsConf 2008 and the Maglev announcement, news of the release of Ruby 1.8.7 passed rather quietly. The download URLs can be found here, but note that the official Ruby-Lang.org download page does not reflect 1.8.7′s release yet.

Ruby 1.8.7 is a point release of the stable, production-ready 1.8.x branch, so it should be ready to roll out to your deployment environments but be cautious. It features many bug fixes, but also some performance enhancements and significant back-ports of Ruby 1.9 functionality (enumeration objects in particular). More information is available in the release NEWS file. Read More

The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up

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By Peter Cooper / June 2, 2008

RailsConf 2008 – the primary conference for Rails developers – took place over the last few days (May 29th to June 1st, 2008). By all accounts, everyone had a great time, but not everyone could attend so here’s a casual roundup of what happened.

The best overall “walkthrough” of the conference I’ve seen has been by Drew Blas who put together a great set of blog posts covering: Friday morning, Friday afternoon, Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon. He even put together a final summary. Great work Drew! Read More

Ruby and Rails Jobs for May 2008

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By Peter Cooper / May 30, 2008

(Credit: amanito – License: CC 2.0 AO)

From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing – and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) come a few new opportunities:

Rails and JavaScript Developer (Pyromedia Studios, California) – Pyromedia Studios are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer with JavaScript experience, preferably with experience with social networking and general Web design. Initially it’d start as a 4 – 6 month contract but could turn into full-time employment, if desired. It seems as if off-site might be okay, but contact them for details.

Rails Software Engineer (Limos.com, San Francisco) – Limos.com is looking for a Rails software engineer to re-engineer the Limos.com site. Read More

Active Record Screencasts: The Pragmatic Programmers Get Into Screencasting

By Peter Cooper / May 30, 2008

The Pragmatic Programmers (who brought us the “Pickaxe“) have decided to branch into screencasting with Pragmatic Screencasts. At launch, screencasts for Expression Engine, OS X Core Animation, Erlang, and Rails are available. On the Rails front, Ryan Bates (of Railscasts fame) has been brought on board to create a series called “Everyday Active Record.” So far two episodes, each focusing on a different area of Rails / Active Record, are available (at $5 each) but more are promised over time.

The first two episodes are “Designing Models with Associations” and “Finding and Scoping Models.” I’ve watched both and they do a great job of taking a chunk of Active Record / Rails functionality and demonstrating the “right” way to use it. Read More

21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code

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By Peter Cooper / May 26, 2008

I get to see a lot of Ruby code while writing for Ruby Inside. Most is very good, but sometimes we forget some of Ruby’s shortcuts and tricks and instead reinvent the wheel. In this post I present 21 different Ruby tricks, from those that most experienced developers already use every day to those that are more obscure. Before writing this piece, for example, I had no idea about trick number 2! Whatever your level, a refresh may help you the next time you encounter similar scenarios.

Due to the code-heavy nature of this post, I’m taking the rare step of putting this post “under the fold” and encourage you to visit the site for the full list of the 21 Ruby tricks.

Community Engine – Rails Plugin That Adds Social Networking To Your App

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By Peter Cooper / May 24, 2008

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Prolific Rails developer Bruno Bornsztein (interviewed on Ruby Inside in February 2007) does it again! Not content to settle for releasing 14-plus Rails related projects and Web sites, he has developed Community Engine, an “instant open-source social network plugin” for Rails. Unlike Insoshi and Lovd By Less, which are full social networking Rails applications, Community Engine is a plugin that can add social networking features to existing Rails applications.

Community Engine provides authentication, profile, search, blogging (with tagging, categories and rich-text editing), photo, bookmarking, forum, and other similar functionality. Community Engine has been extracted from the features of two successful social networking sites, Curbly and Uncooped, and has effectively been stress-tested by the general public for the last year. Read More

28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster

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By Peter Cooper / May 23, 2008

Passenger (often known as “mod_rails“) is an Apache module developed by Phusion, a small Dutch IT consultancy, that makes it easy to deploy Rails applications on Apache-based stacks. Passenger follows on well from the popular “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability on the Web” discussion of January 2008 in that it mostly solves the Rails deployment issue (see SwitchPipe for an alternative that can deal with non-Rails frameworks).

Since its launch in April, Passenger has become quite popular and a lot of developers are already using it to rapidly deploy Rails sites. Even popular budget Web hosting company Dreamhost has got in on the action, and is offering cheap, Passenger-based Rails application hosting. Read More

Rubinius On Rails: Rubinius Becomes 3rd Ruby Implementation to Run Rails

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By Peter Cooper / May 19, 2008

Evan Phoenix has announced that the Rubinius project has hit a major milestone: Rubinius can run Rails! This makes it implementation #3 (after MRI and JRuby) to join the Rails club and will help cement its reputation as a strong, key implementation to watch in the future. Chad Fowler goes as far as to assert that in a year’s time, Rubinius will be used in production deployments and quickly become the defacto standard Ruby implementation shortly thereafter.

Eyes are now on Microsoft’s implementation, IronRuby, that may also be joining the Rails club soon.

This post is sponsored by 16bugs — You know how cumbersome most bug trackers are. Read More

Deploying Rails Applications: The Book

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By Peter Cooper / May 15, 2008

I usually try to get a review copy and read through a book before mentioning it here, but a book like Deploying Rails Applications (Amazon.com alternative) has been in demand for a long time now. Its provenance (coming from the keyboards of Ezra “Engine Yard” Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin – and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) encourages me to support it without direct review. That’s not to say it’s certainly a good book, but it darn well shouldn’t be a bad one.

The book covers deploying Rails applications under shared hosting, virtual machine, and dedicated server hosting environments, and looks at the variety of technologies you can use, such as Apache, Nginx and Mongrel. Read More

Merbunity: Merb’s Community Continues To Grow

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By Peter Cooper / May 13, 2008

Merbunity is a new site dedicated to “news, projects, and tutorials” related to the Merb Web framework (increasingly a common alternative to Rails). It’s very early days, but it’s well designed, and the initial content is good. It feels a little like a Ruby Inside for Merb. Great job! Among the launch content, and of almost immediate interest to Mac-based Merb developers, is Dr. Nic Williams’ TextMate bundle for Merb.

It should not be hard for Merbunity to get traction with Merb fans. In the past few months the amount of amazing content for Merb developers has grown significantly. Key examples include the Merb wiki, the Merb book, the “How to create a chat wall” tutorial, and even Ruby Inside’s own list of 21 Merb links, tutorials, and other resources. Read More

Rails 2.1 Release Candidate 1 Released

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By Peter Cooper / May 12, 2008

Hours ago, David Heinemeier Hansson announced informally on Twitter:

Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged, the gems are on the beta server, official announcement shortly. But no need holding you back from trying it.

New features include built-in timezone support, Gem dependencies, better caching, and more.

To get Rails 2.1 RC1 from the beta gems server, just use:

sudo gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/

If you prefer to go native, Ryan Bates of Railscasts has already produced a screencast showing how to install Rails 2.1 RC1 using Git.

To keep up with the community chatter about Rails 2.1, check out this search for “Rails 2.1″ on Twitter Summize. Read More

Rack Makes It Onto JRuby

By Peter Cooper / May 11, 2008

Most Ruby developers should be familiar with Rack, an interface / library that abstracts away a lot of the banalities of hooking up application code to HTTP servers. It’s used by several Ruby Web application frameworks already, some as a default – such as Merb, and others as an optional extra – such as Rails. Rack is significant because it provides a standard for Web-facing Ruby applications and frameworks to adhere to and is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard in this space.

Nick Sieger has developed JRuby-Rack, a variant of Rack that runs on the Java-based Ruby implementation, JRuby. Read More

Ruby Hoedown – Huntsville, AL – August 8 & 9 (and a Canadian event too)

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By Peter Cooper / May 8, 2008

Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008. It’s billed as the “Ruby conference for the South” and is sponsored by Engine Yard. Keynote speakers so far are David A. Black (of Ruby Central fame) and Chris Wanstrath (of GitHub fame). Registration is $149 until June 2nd.

And a Bonus: Toronto Rails Project Night!

The Toronto Rails Project Night is a much smaller affair than the Ruby Hoedown, but definitely deserves some attention if you’re in or near Toronto, Canada. The 5th one is being held next week on Tuesday, May 13th. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper