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Ruby and Rails Jobs for July 2008
(Remix of an original CC 2.0 licensed work by Joichi Ito.)
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:
Senior Java Developer with Ruby (Vonage, New Jersey) - Vonage, the well known VoIP company, are looking for a software developer with both Java and Ruby experience. They offer a fun, casual and relaxed environment, a $100/month food credit, dry cleaning and laundry service, medical, dental and vision plans, as well as stock options. In return, you should have both strong knowledge and experience of both Java and Ruby. I suspect not a lot of people will meet the requirements for this job, but it could be extremely rewarding for someone who does!
Incredible Systems/Network Administrator Required! (San Francisco, CA) - Rapleaf, a fast growing SF-based startup in the personal information / privacy space, are looking for a systems and network administrator to manage their Linux (CentOS based, primarily) servers, backup systems, and other network requirements. You will need to be a hot-shot at systems administration and be ready to learn (or already know how) to scale Rails applications (and yes, Rails can scale!)
Atlanta-based Experience Ruby on Rails Developer / Designer (Buford, GA) - A small start-up in Atlanta is looking for an experienced software developer to help develop the next generation of their software. They seek a senior level developer with strong Ruby and Rails skills.
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.
If you or your company have openings for Ruby and/or Rails developers, consider checking out the Ruby Inside job board. Your job not only gets featured in the sidebar of every Ruby Inside page, but also summarized in posts like this. You could even leave a comment on this post if you want.
Note: There are even more jobs over at RubyNow's jobs section and on the 37signals Job Board.
Active Record Screencasts: The Pragmatic Programmers Get Into Screencasting
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. Ryan’s vast experience makes the screencasts good demonstrations of how to use Rails “properly.”
The screencasts are certainly not for anybody who follows Rails Edge like a hawk and keeps on top of everything Rails, but for those who’d like to gain extra confidence from seeing a Rails master at work with Rails 2.1’s features, they’re a bargain. They’re well produced, go along at a nice pace, and Ryan makes a good narrator. I look forward to seeing more from this series in future. Definitely consider checking them out, especially if you want to support Ryan for the hard work he does with Railscasts.
It’s also worth noting that the Pragmatic Programmers are also looking for other people (see bottom question) who might be interested in working with them to produce more screencasts. They do the post-production and pay 50% royalties.
Post supported by Ruby Hoedown: Come on down to the south for the Ruby Hoedown, the South’s regional Ruby conference! Submit a talk now or sign up for early registration for $50 off. The first 50 people to use the promo code IMINSIDE will get an additional $25 off the price!
28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster
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. The de-facto Ruby (and Rails) deployment system seems to change rapidly (remember Apache+FastCGI, then lighttpd+FastCGI, then Apache+Mongrel, then Nginx+Mongrel…?) and while Passenger may or may not be a de-facto standard in a few years’ time, it’s certainly becoming the standard for now, so jump on board!
To help with your leap on to the Passenger bandwagon, I’ve collected together some of the better resources and blog posts of recent weeks covering its use:
General
Official Passenger / mod_rails Site - The official site for the Apache module. Features testimonials, installation instructions, documentation, and information on how you can further support the project.
Passenger / mod_rails Source Repository - Passenger / mod_rails is an open-source project at heart, and the code is available on Github.
Passenger Users Guide - A very Apache-documentation-esque guide to using, configuring, and trouble shooting Passenger.
Installation
Ask Your Doctor About mod_rails - Geoffrey Grosenbach (of Peepcode fame) writes about Passenger from a user’s point of view. He walks through rolling out Passenger on his own server in a bunch of easy steps. He also covers log rotation.
Using Passenger on OS X for Rails development - Manfred Stienstra quickly walks through what’s involved in setting up Passenger on Mac OS X.
Configurating [sic] Passenger (mod_rails) on SliceHost with Ubuntu 7.10 - Ben Hughes covers the roll-out of Passenger, SQLite 3 and Rails on a SliceHost VM.
Ubuntu 8.04 Rails Server Using Passenger - Ron Valente covers the installation of Passenger on Ubuntu 8.04 (a.k.a. Hardy Heron). This is a very well put together guide, cut into nice bite size pieces with well formatted code examples.
Passenger Installation in Portuguese - Fabio Akita presents a Passenger installation guide in Portuguese.
Discussion & Benchmarks
mod_rails vs thin vs ebb vs mongrel - A comparison of four different Rails serving techniques. Ebb appears to have the edge.
Interview with Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui of Phusion - Fabio Akita interviews the two masterminds behind mod_rails.
Looking at mod_rails and FiveRuns Rails Instrumentation - Oliver of FiveRuns takes a look at mod_rails and examines its usage scenarios.
A few notes on using Passenger (mod_rails) with Mac OS X - A quick examination of mod_rails on OS X.
Miscellaneous Experiences Some People Have Had With Passenger - A roundup of various impressions and experiences people have had so far.
mod_rails vs Mongrel vs Thin - Benchmarks performed by Phusion themselves with three alternative deployment solutions.
Tools and Tips
mod_rails and Capistrano - Tom Copeland presents a simple Capistrano recipe for restarting mod_rails applications.
Using Capistrano with Passenger - A slightly deeper guide to using Capistrano to deploy mod_rails applications.
Installing Typo (blog engine) and mod_rails for multiple accounts - A walkthrough of creating and installing multiple instances of the Typo blogging engine using mod_rails.
Disclaimer: I don’t use and haven’t tried mod_rails yet, so any corrections to above comments are welcomed and encouraged.
This post is sponsored by KickStart Events — RubyOnRails Training at the EMCC (East Midlands Conference Centre), UK. High-quality hands-on workshops and courses for web application developers. Taught by experienced mentors using live coding sessions, slides and participatory discussion.
Rubinius On Rails: Rubinius Becomes 3rd Ruby Implementation to Run Rails
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. We know it, too! If you believe bug tracking should be an easy and unobtrusive task, you should try 16bugs right now. Use coupon code “RUBYINSIDE” and get 50% off when you upgrade your account.
Mack: A Fast, “Best of the Rest” Web App Framework
Mack is an interesting new Ruby Web app framework (of which, as we know, there are many!) that takes some of the best elements of other Web app frameworks (including Rack support!) and presents itself in a very modular, “agile” way. Developer Mark Bates gives the inspiration for Mack’s development as “portals” and says that a lot of Mack’s development will be focused on this, including features like a distributed routing system and interoperability between multiple trusted, local apps.
I’ve personally used Mack (along with jQuery) in the last day or two to develop a chat client. It’s worked out very well. Mack is very fast and very light, but offers a familiar Rails-style directory and file structure. I chose DataMapper (one of many options) for my ORM, and it worked seamlessly. Mack also has thorough documentation.
Mack is certainly worth a try if you’re either a Web application framework junkie or looking for something that’s modular and fast and won’t be too alien if you’re already familiar with Rails.
Waves: A New Rails-like Web Applications Framework
Ruby Waves is a new Web application framework for Ruby, developed by Dan Yoder. On the surface, this makes it seem “Rails-like” but Waves is billing itself as a “next-generation” framework, a cutting edge Rails-inspired framework, if you will. Dan says that Waves is “not a better Rails” but the realization of an evolution of the ideas behind frameworks like Rails. For example, Waves supports request lambdas (mapping a request to a block, rather than a URL pattern to a controller and action), just-in-time resources, nested layouts, and hot-patching. Waves is also thread-safe.
Dan has done a great job at documenting Waves, with a screencast, tutorial, and a bumper-packed official site all ready to go. The tutorial (the creation of a simple blog system, as usual!) demonstrates that creating a basic app is actually even easier than under Rails, although some of the techniques will seem initially unfamiliar.
It’ll be interesting to see if new, superior, ultra-flexible frameworks like Waves catch on, with the amount of support and motion currently behind the incumbents: Rails and Merb.
(Note: Dan has been interviewed by Robert Bazinet of InfoQ. It’s worth reading to get an idea of Dan’s motivations and where he sees Waves going in the future.)
Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #17
JRuby 1.1 Release Candidate 2 Released
The latest release candidate of JRuby 1.1 has been released. 260 issues have been fixed since RC1 and a number of memory and IO improvements have been made. JRuby developer Charles Nutter gives some interesting background to JRuby’s current state. Nutter explains that JRuby’s performance now regularly exceeds that of Ruby 1.8.6 and even Ruby 1.9 in places. Meanwhile, other developers have been doing benchmarks.
A Single File Rails Application
Pratik Naik has done the unthinkable and made… a single file Rails application. Clever stuff. He then created a tiny wrapper for this nugget of joy called tinyrails which makes things even easier.
Sending Ruby to the Jail: An Attempt at a Haml “Safe Mode”
Sven Fuchs has been working on a “safe mode” plugin for the Haml templating engine. This would allow regular users to supply Haml code for use on public Web sites, but without the risk of malicious code causing issues on the server. I picked some holes in Sven’s initial approach, and he went back to the drawing board. Essentially he’s trying to use Ryan Davis’ Ruby parsing libraries to make any Ruby code “safe” without relying on running code in an actual sandbox. I’m still not entirely convinced his latest approach is 100% safe but it managed to succeed with all of the initial “hacks” I could think of, so I’m happy to mention it.
Sven is hoping that by releasing his work so far to the public, someone will come up with a clever method for getting it to break. If Sven’s efforts succeed, of course, then his technique may be useful for non-Haml applications and allow us to “sandbox” Ruby code in yet another way.
Radiator: Your build statuses on a giant LED display
A bit of fun this one. “The Hammer” wrote in with news of Radiator, a handy Ruby-based service for blasting your build messages to a USB BetaBrite LED display.
Ruby MySpace Platform and YouTube APIs
Shane Vitarana has released two libraries. The first is a new one called Spacer and implements a Ruby API for the “MySpace Platform”’s REST API. The second is an update to an existing library, YouTube-G, an API for YouTube’s GData API.
Building a Twitter Agent with Ruby and Rails
Dominiek ter Heide has put together a great tutorial that walks you through building a “Twitter agent” using Ruby, Rails and XMPP. For those who aren’t on Twitter yet, it’s a free micro-blogging cum “presence” information service that allows users to write 140 character messages that are supposed to represent their current state / feelings / location / etc. A Twitter agent, therefore, is essentially an automated Twitter user that can deliver information to other Twitter users.
The tutorial is quite in-depth with lots of code examples and helpful diagrams. Dominiek explains it all very directly, and even has the developed service running for real, so you know you’re seeing something that actually works.
SwitchPipe: My New Rapid and Easy Way To Deploy Web Apps
It’s not very often I get to announce my own work here, but SwitchPipe is a new project I’ve been working on since my “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web” post. It was Ruby Inside’s most commented-on post yet and inspired a lot of discussion about the state of deploying Ruby apps online, and got me to thinking about how to build something to achieve ultra-easy Ruby Web app deployment.
SwitchPipe is a proof of concept Web application process manager and request proxy. Backend Web applications are loaded into their own processes, making SwitchPipe language and framework agnostic. HTTP requests are proxied at the TCP level using information extracted from the HTTP headers to establish which backend application is requested. Unlike dispatch / proxying tools that take a totally different approach (such as the wonderful Swiftiply), SwitchPipe is not designed for raw performance, but ease of use and simplicity. You don’t have to think about port numbers (beyond the one that SwitchPipe resides on!), starting or stopping backend apps, and a whole lot of other dull stuff. You can even run a full demo of SwitchPipe once you’ve checked it out via SVN (or downloaded the tarball) with a single command (it’ll even install the dependencies!).
SwitchPipe is not the solution, but it’s a solution, and one that is well suited to certain types of environment. I’ve been running several Rails applications live using SwitchPipe and deploying new versions is as simple as an svn checkout.. no restarts, nothing. Adding a new Rails app (or Merb, or Ramaze, or whatever) to SwitchPipe is a case of uploading, creating a config file, and that’s it.. you don’t even have to restart SwitchPipe!
It’s early days for SwitchPipe, but I’m pretty happy with it just for the major benefits it’s provided me in deploying various Ruby-backed Web apps, so hopefully a few other people will find a use for it. If you do, make sure to join its Google Group! And yes, it will also be available via Git soon.
Watch the RailsConf 2007 Keynote Videos
Both David Hansson and Chad Fowler have announced that videos of the keynote presentations given at RailsConf 2007 are now available to view online. The downside is that you only see the speakers and not their slides or accompanying code, so keep that in mind before digging in too deep. The best presentations are David’s keynote and Ze Frank’s (though Ze’s is totally irrelevant in topic, naturally).
Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development by Elliot Smith and Roch Nichols
I was kindly sent a copy of Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development (or amazon.com link) by Elliot Smith and Roch Nichols by publisher Packt. As the authors are both British and the leading author is called Elliot Smith (close enough to the name of my favorite recording artist) I felt compelled to give it a look over and mention it here.
The book states that it’s aimed at corporate developers who already have a rudimentary knowledge of Rails but who want to move on to building a full-scale application with a view to deployment within the enterprise. Despite this, the book still covers some of the basics like installing Rails, creating a new application, getting an IDE, installing a database engine, and so forth, although there seem to be rather random expectations that you already know certain things about Ruby further on.
An interesting concept used in this book is an underlying narrative based around a fictional company that has various problems that can be solved using Ruby on Rails. It forms the basis of a chatty, friendly, but ultimately pragmatic approach that permeates the book. The narrative also enables the authors to guide readers through an “enterprise” problem in the way that developers at such an enterprise would approach it, which takes the book far out of the realm of dry, reference material, and into practical, hand-held, tutorial land.
In short, I really like this book and I think it’s an excellent place for developers within a corporate environment (as opposed to independent developers) to start. Unfortunately, however, it also suffers from the breakneck speed that Rails is advancing at, as it squarely focuses on techniques used with the Rails 1.0.x, 1.1.x and 1.2.x revisions, with no coverage of formats, REST, and all the various Rails 2.0 goodies. I don’t consider this a major failing, however, as this is a great book to bridge the gaping chasm between, say, Agile Web Development with Rails and The Rails Way, and it is perfectly tailored to its market.
Ruby Plus: Another Ruby/Rails Screencast Site
Ruby Plus is a site offering free Ruby and Rails related screencasts recorded by Bala Paranj, much in the same vein as Ryan Bates’ Railscasts. The screencasts are generally similar in length and overall format to those from Railscasts. So far there are 29 episodes you can download.
The first twelve screencasts in the archive (for which you have to register to download, alas) were exclusively Ruby, covering topics like blocks, class_eval, modules, recursion, and so on, but unfortunately the rest of the screencasts have been entirely Rails focused beyond those first twelve. It’s still a source worth checking for Ruby and Rails screencasts though, so give it a look.
(Update: Several people have reported to me that they have an issue with Ruby Plus being portrayed in a positive light. I’ll admit I haven’t watched a significant number of the screencasts, just a couple in fact, but what I saw seemed okay in terms of production. With all the complaints, however, I figure you should be aware that there appear to be quite a few people who are not keen on the site, so you may just want to skip this post.. but I cannot remove it as it is now part of the public record and, as you probably know, I don’t do censorship.)
Rails Web Host Engine Yard Now $3.5 Million Richer!
(photo credit: The Consumerist - CC Attribution 2.0)
Prominent Rails Web hosting company Engine Yard have raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, a particularly successful venture capital firm who backed AOL and eBay in the early days. Money is afloweth into the Ruby and Rails sector!
The best write up of this news is by Obie Fernandez over at InfoQ. He talks about Engine Yard’s operation, their hiring of Rubinius developers, and Engine Yard’s thoughts for the future. Interestingly:
In discussing the benefits of taking VC money at this time, Engine Yard CEO Lance emphasized the fact that unlike hosting, Rubinius development is a longer-term play, which along with Merb may eventually become part of a commercially-available technology stack.
Nice work, Engine Yard. The drinks are on you!
No True “mod_ruby” Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web
Note: This post was drafted before DHH’s “The deal with shared hosts” post, but as it covers similar ground, it’s worth reading too. DHH’s opinion appears to be that shared hosts should put up or shut up, but I disagree and suggest this is something we need to solve as a community.
Most of us in the Ruby community know that deploying Web apps powered by Ruby can be like pulling teeth. Running up simple CGI scripts is easy enough, but once you move on to more robust systems, using things like Rails, Sinatra, Ramaze, Merb, Camping, whatever, it deviates significantly from the well-established “just upload it” route. The reason is that applications built around these frameworks tend to expose themselves directly via HTTP daemons, using libraries such as Mongrel or WEBrick, and then requests from Web servers like Apache need to be proxied through to them, but this feels like a hackish workaround to the fact we lack a proper “mod_ruby.”
In the PHP world, things are a lot simpler. Almost universally Apache comes with mod_php built in, and PHP scripts uploaded to any sort of Web space, shared or not, tend to “just work.” This is POLS (Principle of Least Surprise) in deployment. With Rails apps, say, you either need to go to a specialized, over priced Web host, rig up Apache with reasonably fragile FastCGI solutions, set up a Mongrel cluster separately to Apache and then do some proxying, or even deploy a whole new stack based around Mongrel clustering, Nginx and the like. This makes deploying a Ruby application offputting to the typical webmaster and is, in my opinion, damaging Ruby’s viability as a mass market Web application technology. If I’m going to put up a blog, I’ll use WordPress (Ruby Inside actually does). If I want a forum, I’ll find one of the many PHP variants. Why? Easy deployment on well established, easy to replicate application stacks.
Since PHP, Python (including Django apps), and even Java apps (via Tomcat) can be deployed reasonably easily on an Apache stack with the relevant modules installed, shouldn’t we be able to get mod_ruby doing the same thing? I’m definitely willing to help in whatever way I can on this, as I’d love to see Ruby / Rails / whatever apps as easy to deploy as PHP apps! This is the main reason Ruby powered forum and blog systems aren’t beating WordPress and vBulletin. Unfortunately, I’m pretty dumb when it comes to the technicalities of Apache modules and rigging these things up, but if the main impediment is money, publicity, programmers, or whatever, I’m sure we can figure something out as a community.
So some questions arise:
1) Is there / why isn’t there a version of mod_ruby that doesn’t have the “class sharing” issue? What is the technical impediment?
2) Is there any immutable reason that Ruby apps couldn’t, in the future, be deployed in a PHP-esque fashion?
When we have this ease of deployment, imagine how significantly the market for Ruby powered Web sites and applications could grow! But, first, is it even possible? We’ll await answers from the technical wizards out there, but if we can take even a single step forward on this, we’re getting somewhere.
A Great Ruby on Rails Security Presentation
Jonathan Weiss recently had a session about Ruby on Rails security at 24C3, the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, in Germany. He has made the slides (44 of them) available, as well as a 45 minute long Google Video with the slides, video, and sound to enjoy. Jonathan goes into data sanitation, cross site scripting attacks, cookies, and lots of similarly good stuff.
(Credit for letting me know about this: Martin Sadler)
Zed Shaw Goes Nuclear On Our Community
In "Rails Is A Ghetto", Zed Shaw, creator of the popular Mongrel HTTP daemon / library, puts together an amazing 6000+ word rant on various areas of the Rails ecosystem (but, by association, the Ruby community too) and tears pieces out of several people in the community, along with Rails' code quality and Rails / Ruby consulting companies. Zed explains that the rant is "part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community."
If you're the type to get depressed by reading some pretty powerful ranting and raving, give it a miss, but this is a true "rubbernecking at the car crash" type article, and Zed, never one to sugar coat things, tells it as it is. The rant is due to be updated in the next few days with Zed's opinions about sucky Ruby conferences and why "the Pickaxe book is what killed Ruby."
From what I can make out, there's no way to comment over at Zed's site, so maybe this post will make a good place for you to comment with your own opinions.. so go for it.
Interesting Rails Tidbits #2
The Future of Web Services Presentation
Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy gave a talk last week at the Orlando Ruby Users Group called "The Future of Web Services," where he looked at what Web services are, what REST is, how REST solves Web service related problems, how Rails works with REST, and so forth. A live Rails coding demo is included and Gregg gives it his usual well-produced, charismatic all.
Learning Rails Podcast
Learning Rails is a new, professionally produced podcast by Michael Slater that takes listeners through the concepts behind Ruby on Rails development. The podcast is designed for people who are new to Ruby and Rails, rather than seasoned developers.
Free German Rails E-book
OpenRoRBook is a new, free German language e-book that covers Rails development. The book covers 59 pages and walks through the usual steps of producing a simple Rails application. Supposedly there are going to be multiple editions with more specific information about Rails 2.0 to follow. They are also hoping to translate the book into English in the future.
Commercial Rails Application Monitoring from FiveRuns
FiveRuns, somewhat a pioneer in the Ruby on Rails enterprise market, is offering a service called RM-Manage (30 day trial available) that monitors your Rails application's performance and reliability in real time and gives you in-depth views into the data obtained. FiveRuns claim this makes it easy to spot bottlenecks and to resolve reliability and performance issues before they become user complaints. FiveRuns are also known for their enterprise Ruby on Rails application stack, RM-Install. This week, FiveRuns has announced a partnership with UK Rails host, Brightbox, to offer a bundled package including both hosting and FiveRuns' monitoring services.
ActiveJax: An ActiveRecord to JavaScript Bridge
ActiveJax is a Rails plugin developed by Nicholas Schlueter that acts as a bridge between ActiveRecord and Prototype-backed JavaScript. This means you can call ActiveRecord model methods from JavaScript using AJAX. Example:
ActiveJax.Author.find_by_name("Nicholas Schlueter").each(function(author) {alert(author.name);});
I asked Nicholas how this differs from the existing Jester library developed by Thoughtbot. One significant difference is the syntax. ActiveJax's mechanisms are all embedded underneath the ActiveJax object, whereas Jester offers up the "models" more directly within JavaScript. ActiveJax also doesn't depend on the application providing RESTful services, it's possible to call any method on the models. All this said, the motivations for using Jester versus ActiveJax cross significantly, so it's worth checking out both libraries if this is an area that interests you.
More info is available in this blog post by Nicholas, including a link to a sample application.
Ramaze: Another Light Ruby Web Framework, But With MVC!
Ramaze is a simple, light weight (in a good way!), modular Web framework developed in Ruby. Like Rails, and unlike some of its newer competitors, such as Sinatra, Ramaze sticks to the MVC (Model, View, Controller) paradigm, making it more like a lighter, more modular Merb-alike. Ramaze is already a year old, and one thing that the official Ramaze Web site does right is provide lots of example code and documentation. The framework has also seen four releases in the last six months, a sure sign that someone cares about it.
Inspired by Ruby Inside's recent post, "Reprise: A Ruby-Powered Blogging App in 100 Lines Including Templates," Aman Gupta, one of the developers of Ramaze, has converted the code from a Sinatra-based non-MVC format over to the Ramaze equivalent, so you can get a direct comparison of the two different approaches by reading two sets of code for the same application.
Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don't Need Separate Posts #10
jRails - Seamlessly Redefines Rails Helpers to Use jQuery Instead of Prototype
jRails is an intriguing Rails plugin that makes it extremely easy to switch from using the Prototype JavaScript library that comes with Rails to the increasingly more popular jQuery. From most of the reports I've seen, jQuery is faster and I've seen several blog posts just in the last week that emphasize just how much easier and concise jQuery code is (it's not hard to find these reports, if you're interested). The only downside to jQuery is that all of Rails' helpers are written to use Prototype.. but jRails solves that by redefining how they work so that they work with jQuery instead! Talk about rocking the boat!
RailsCamp 2.0 - A Totally Bonzer Weekend for Rails Coders
RailsCamp is an informal Rails camp (literally, you're in bunk style accommodation) in Australia for Rails coders. The next one is running from this Friday, November 23rd through to Monday, November 26th, so unless you're local to Melbourne, it might be too late to sign up. Organizer Pat Allan wants to build up more knowledge of the event, however, so check out their site and follow their progress if you want to attend a future event. Previous events look like they were fun, with much evidence of coding and goofing off.
Using Ruby to Monitor Your Amazon EC2 Instances
James Knowlton and PJ Cabrera have put together a great tutorial on how to use Ruby to monitor and maintain Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) instances.
LiveConsole - Run IRB Sessions On Remote, Running Ruby Applications
I'll let them do the talking.. "LiveConsole is a library for providing IRB over a TCP connection. If you add it to your application, you can run arbitrary code against your application. For example, you can: Inspect the state of a running application, Change the state of the application, Patch code on the fly, without a restart [...]"
Droid Sans Mono - A New Coding Font
Not directly Ruby related, but Droid Sans Mono is a new coding font that seems to have gathered quite a few fans in the last few weeks. Might be worth a try in your editor of choice (if you want to recommend any other coding fonts, however, leave a comment here.. quite a few people read them!)
Win A Copy of "Pro Active Record"
Pro Active Record "Databases with Ruby and Rails" (Amazon) is a new book by Kevin Marshall, Chad Pytel, and Jon Yurek, published by Apress. The book goes deep into the ActiveRecord ORM library, a key part of Rails that makes it easy to deal with information stored within a database in an object oriented way. There are already several reviews on Amazon.com, although Josh Susser has written something more indepth.
To celebrate the launch of the book, the guys over at ThoughtBot (where both Chad and Jon work) are running a contest with three prizes of signed copies of Pro Active Record. To enter, you have to e-mail ThoughtBot with examples of the craziest and most absurd application ideas your clients have come up with. Some examples and details of how to enter are in ThoughtBot's blog post. Good luck!
Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don't Need Separate Posts #8
Experiements with Windows Form Design with IronRuby
It's still early days, but Huw Collingbourne takes a look at the first steps made by IronRuby, a .NET implementation of the Ruby language, into native Windows form design.
JRuby 1.0.2 Released
It's only a point release, but JRuby 1.0.2 has hit the streets. Support for Rails 1.2.5 has been included, and almost 100 issues have been fixed since 1.0.1. Several "nasty issues" being experienced by Windows users have also been fixed. Remember that you can keep up with this and other JRuby news over at our sister site JRubyInside.com.
eBay Backed Rails Site Launches
Josh Susser has announced the launch of MicroPlace, a new eBay-backed Web site developed in Rails and aimed at allowing people to make "micro investments" in projects in the developing world. The site is all Rails (using ActiveRecord too) and MySQL, and unusual because eBay is typically a strongly Java environment.
Ruby Developer Tortured?
On the lighter side of this week's news, Meng Wong highlights a poor Ruby developer being tortured by a gorgeous woman in Mountain View, CA.
Ruby Jobs Update for October 2007
As long time readers will know, Ruby Inside has its own jobs board at jobs.rubyinside.com. It doesn't just have jobs posted only by Ruby Inside readers, but also jobs scraped from all over the Web with many Ruby and Rails related jobs being picked up every day (e.g. how does being a Ruby Engineer in Los Angeles take your fancy?).
Only two jobs were posted by Ruby Inside readers in October, but deserve special attention:
Ruby / MySQL Developers - Irvine, CA
WEGCash, an adult affiliate network company, are looking for some talented Ruby-focused Web developers to join their team in Irvine, California. Full medical, a matching 401k, and bonus scheme are all perks, as well as the opportunity to work in sunny Irvine. The level of Ruby experience you have isn't too important as long as you have the willingness to learn.
Ruby on Rails Developer - Boston / New York
Thoughtbot, one of the most exciting and progressive Rails-focused agencies out there, is looking for a crack Ruby on Rails developer to work from either their Boston or New York office. Any potential applicants need to be solidly grounded in Ruby and Rails, be fully up to date with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and be familiar with test driven development. Thoughtbot offers all the usual perks including medical and 401k, but also maintains a 40 hour work week, a fridge with free drinks, and a free lunch on Fridays.
London Rails Developer wanting £45-55k?
Separate from the Ruby Inside focused jobs, today I came across a job ad posted just yesterday for a senior Ruby on Rails developer in the UK. Nothing spectular about that, except the money being offered is actually realistic for a change.. so if you're interested.. a central London based Rails developer is needed for a multi-language Web development team with a starting salary of £45k-£55k.
DHH's Keynote at RailsConf Europe 2007
The guys at RailsOnWave have done a great job of recording David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote speech at the latest RailsConf Europe and have put it online, viewable within a Flash video player. Nice work!
RailsConf EU 2007 Wrap Up
(photo credit: dwortlehock)
RailsConf Europe 2007 is over and it's time to wrap up. As before, there are oodles of pictures on Flickr with the "RailsConfEurope" tag (yah-boo to you miserable sods who don't use Creative Commons licenses for your photos) and DHH points to all of the presentations given at the conference (covering areas as wide as Ferret, REST, Adobe Flex, Amazon S3 and JRuby). Continuing from his fine coverage of Monday, the first day of the conference, Robert Dempsey succinctly wraps up the Tuesday morning and afternoon sessions, as well as the Wednesday morning sessions, and then Wednesday in its entirety. These are worth a read if you didn't go, as he provides some context missing elsewhere.
Last but not least, David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote. The King of Rails seemed to focus mostly on Rails 2.0, which will be more of an evolutionary step than a revolutionary one. Casper Fabricus has a superb writeup with many choice quotes and code examples, although Nick Sieger has done a good job too. On his own blog, however, the King decided to post his views of Sun's ever-growing support for Ruby and Rails and his ultimate satisfaction at the success of RailsConf in general.
Seesaw: An Improved Restart System for Mongrel
Most Rails developers will be familiar with Zed Shaw's Mongrel, a great HTTP library used by most Rails developers to either test or deploy their applications (it's also pretty great for building your own basic HTTP handlers too, but I digress).
Sometimes when restarting applications after code updates, some requests can be "lost" in the whole process, particularly in high-traffic environments. Seesaw, developed by Max Muermann and Matt Allen, however, resolves this problem by restarting your mongrel processes one by one so that availability is ensured. Seesaw is available as a gem (gem install seesaw), although this blog post is essential reading to learn about integration with Nginx and Apache.
"Pro ActiveRecord" Book Ready To Pre-Order
Pro ActiveRecord (previously known as "Pro ActiveRecord for Ruby") by Kevin Marshall, Chad Pytel, and Jon Yurek is an advanced-level book about using the ORM database library used primarily by Ruby on Rails. To be published on September 10, 2007, the book is now ready to pre-order from Amazon.com for $26.39 (non affiliate link) and runs at 300 pages, so it's likely to be a reasonably complete reference to using the library whether with Rails or not.
Rails Rumble: 48 Hour Rails Coding Competition
In a similar vein to Rails Day comes the Rails Rumble, a 48 hour Ruby on Rails competition. You spend 48 hours developing a cool new Web application, and then all of the apps are judged through a peer-based ranking system in a variety of categories. The fun starts on September 8-9 and registration opens soon at RailsRumble.com. Sponsors include O'Reilly, ActiveReload, Apress, Peepcode, Linode, ActiveState, Pragmatic Programmers, Cashboard, Ruby East, Engine Yard, RoundHaus, and ThoughtBot, so be prepared for some great prizes. Linode is even putting up a VPS for every entrant to deploy their app.
With the extra time allowed and the peer-reviewing process, it seems like Rails Rumble could progress more smoothly than the Rails Days of past, and Ruby Inside will feature more information about the contest and the winners as things progress.