Rails Envy

Episode 20. Info on JRuby, Deploying Rails Applications, Matz' tech talk, the new git bundle for TextMate, some tutorials, a though-provoking post by Jay Fields, and some great information on scaling. As always, a big thanks to Chu Yeow for the edge Rails updates.

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In this episode:

• Deploying Rails Applications book complete!
  The “Deploying Rails Applications” book by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin is now complete. It’s been available as a beta book for a few months now, but this final release includes a chapter on Apache and Nginx scaling, setting up your own XEN installation, and setting up Mysql Master Slave, and Master Master replicated databases.

• Google Tech Talk with Matz
  Google put up a tech talk from Matz on YouTube. Matz explains the different versions of Ruby and goes in to Ruby 1.9 quite a bit. It’s about 50 minutes and he gives some really interesting info out.

• Thomas Enebo's Announcement of JRuby 1.1 RC2
  Charlie Nutter on the new release and what's next
  Last saturday Thomas Enebo announced the release of JRuby 1.1 RC 2, which represents a focus on speed and refinement. With this release most benchmarks are pretty close or are sometimes faster then Ruby 1.9, it also reduced overall memory usage.

• Rush, the Ruby Shell
  Two weeks ago we talked about Heroku, the web application that allows you to code and deploy rails applications without doing any configuration. Adam Wiggen of the Heroku team just released Rush, a replacement for bash and ssh which uses Ruby syntax.

• Farm work to EC2 using processor_pool and Sinatra
  Last week Ari Lerner on the CitrusByte blog posted an awesome tutorial about how to offload image processing onto an EC2 cloud with an S3 storage back-end using Sinatra with the processor pool gem.

• Rails Messaging Tutorial
  If you ever find yourself coding up a web application with a user messaging system, you should definitely check out the Rails Messaging Tutorial by NovaWave Solutions. This tutorial does a good job of getting you started on the right foot with several specifications that aren’t really intuitive from the get go. It’s also a great read if you’re new to rails and you want to read someone else’s code to improve.

• Biggest Rails App
  Last week we talked about a Rails website that is getting 100 million page views a month. Well, we found one that takes more, and this one isn’t using any page caching. “Friends For Sale” is a facbook application written in Rails, and is currently receiving 300 Million page views/month.

• Git Bundle for Textmate
  If you’re starting to use git and you already use Textmate you may want to pickup the new and improved Git bundle released last week.

• Learn Git 10 Different Ways
  While we’re on the topic of Git, Rob Sanheim put up a blog post titled “Learn Git 10 Different Ways” which, contrary to what you might thing, links you to 10 different resources for learning git.

• Skinny Request, Fat Backend
  Eric Allam, a fellow Orlando Ruby programmer wrote up a really interesting article last week entitled "Skinny Request, Fat Backend." The article explains why it’s important that as rails developers we keep our requests as skinny as possible, because of how rails locks every time a request comes in. By using cache columns, ensuring calls to web services don’t timeout, offloading image manipulation and sending emails, and lastly he gives an example of how to isolate a controller action outside of rails by creating a small Rack app which uses thin.

• El Dorado – Community Web Application
  You know how PHP has all of those community systems.. with a message board, events, files, and user system? Now Ruby has something similar called “El Dorado” which is perfect if you need to throw together a website to communicate with your friends, or maybe even for your Ruby Users Group.

• Gems in Rails
  Last week Jay Fields wrote up an interesting article where he brings up the fact that Rails doesn’t really play well with Gems.

• Mumble your Tests
  If you’re developing in linux and are envious of all us Mac users who use growl for our autotest notifications, over on the Caffinated code blog this week you’ll find a script that will allow you to patch Mumbles to do the same thing.

• Rails Undo Redo
  There’s an easy way to implement undo and redo in your rails app thanks to Pascal on the Nano Rails blog. Pascal recently released the Rails Undo Redo plugin, which allows you to give exactly this type of functionality to your models and controllers.

• Radiator: Build status on your Beta Brite
  The guys over on the Something Nimble blog were doing a project where they needed to see progress of their continuous build status, like whether it succeeded or failed. They figured out how to hook up the results of the build to show on a giant LED and then released the application they use to interface with it called Radiator.

• YUI 2.5.0 Released
  For you javascript fans, Yahoo has released version 2.5.0 of the YUI library with lots and lots of goodness and changes.