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Apple and Ruby: The Ongoing Relationship
While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.
A recent InfoQ article highlights some ways that Apple is using Ruby that you might have missed - including:
- The iPhone Configuration Web Utility - A tool written in Ruby on Rails for allowing enterprise customers to manage iPhones.
- The SproutCore JavaScript framework - Which is designed for making desktop-like applications on the web and is used in Apple's new MobileMe applications. SproutCore is installed as a gem, uses generators written in Ruby to create resources and it utilizes Merb to generate HTML artifacts. (Update: SproutCore isn't a Ruby project / Ruby-based system per se, but it does offer some good tie-ins to the Ruby ecosystem.)
- The MacRuby project - Apple's own port of Ruby to the Objective-C runtimes - which should make it much easier to integrate with Cocoa for Desktop development.
I haven't played with the MobileMe web applications much, but I recall thinking that they looked fairly impressive. Have any other Ruby developers tried SproutCore yet? How's it working out for you?
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Apple sells $1 million a day in iPhone applications. Wireless Industry News on the WIN portal
Rails Inside: The Rails-Only Alternative to Ruby Inside
It's been years in the making, but it has finally arrived.. Rails Inside, the Rails-only equivalent of Ruby Inside! Featuring an all-new template, Rails Inside presents information in a similar format and style to Ruby Inside but with a focus entirely on the Ruby on Rails scene. If Rails is your main thing, or a significant part of your development life, get over there and subscribe (by RSS or e-mail - the e-mail version actually looks surprisingly nice I've found).
Rails stories will still crop up on Ruby Inside but in slightly lower numbers. With its focus, Rails Inside will feature lots more interesting Rails stories and cover smaller (but still interesting) announcements that Ruby Inside wouldn't traditionally pick up anyway. Further, Rails Inside features small items "From The Rails Blogosphere" in between the regular posts to highlight interesting posts made elsewhere in the Rails blogosphere, making it a one-stop Rails news shop (note that the Rails blogosphere items are on the site only, not the feed, to avoid any annoyance).
It's still early days for Rails Inside, but the site is under active development and I hope to get a few key features rolled out within the next couple of weeks, including a feed of Rails-related events in the sidebar, a Twitter subscription option, and an improved general view of the Rails blogosphere.
This post supported by Rails Kits: Skip the hassle of writing recurring billing code: use the SaaS Rails Kit to quickly add credit card and PayPal payments to your Rails app. Get 10% off by using the discount code "rubyinside" at checkout before August 1st.
June 2008 Ruby Security Advisory: A Summary
Photo by JL2003 - CC 2.0 Attribution License
The official Ruby blog is reporting "multiple vulnerabilities" in the official Ruby interpreter (MRI). A significant number of versions are affected:
- All versions prior to 1.8.5
- All 1.8.5 versions prior to patch 231
- All 1.8.6 versions prior to patch 230
- All 1.8.7 versions prior to patch 22
- All 1.9.0 versions prior to 1.9.0-2
Jeremy Kemper, at the official Rails blog, advised upgrading immediately, but with the warning that Ruby 1.8.7 only works with Rails 2.1 and later. Numerous commenters, however, have noted significant issues with Rails applications once they've upgraded to Ruby 1.8.6p230 and 1.8.5p231. A poster on RubyFlow suggests Ruby 1.8.6-p230 is not compatible with Rails at all, although others have reported success.
What are the problems?
Zed Shaw has put together a pretty detailed look at what the actual defects are (mostly "general buffer overflow defects, signed integer problems, and path traversal problems").
Eric Monti has posted code examples to demonstrate some issues.
Is it urgent?
It appears that while this is a significant security advisory, and you should be paying attention, there's no 0-day urgency on this as Eric Wong highlights. Walk, but don't run, to the exit. Eric Monti, on the other hand, seems to be quite worried by the security vulnerabilities.
If you're only running your own scripts on your own local machine (that is, not a public-facing Web app), you might be better off waiting for your operating system's packaging system to update Ruby for you (whether on Linux or OS X). The security issues were discovered by Drew Yao of Apple who has suggested a OS X update for this will be going out soon, so it's reasonable to wait for that if you're on OS X.
My personal advice (which is, as noted by Thomas H. Ptacek, "spectacularly bad") is that unless you're already itching to upgrade out of panic, just make sure you're familiar with where all your Ruby deployments are, what versions they're running now, and that you have a good idea of how to upgrade them. Then unless you're confident about upgrading and running tests straight away, I'd wait until a lot more positive noises are coming out of Rails developers upgrading to the latest versions, especially surrounding Ruby 1.8.6p230.
Update: In comments, Thomas H. Ptacek says:
The “walk don’t run” sentiment is dead wrong. You do not need to handle multi-gigabyte strings to trip these vulnerabilities; you just need code that can be coerced into using broken indices. It’s spectacularly bad advice to suggest that people should continue to run code with known memory corruption vulnerabilities.
Quite why anyone would have code that relies on any unchecked / unsanitized data is beyond me, but it's worth keeping in mind if you do. So, panic if you want, but even if you don't, you'll probably still be alive and this news will be forgotten within a week or two.
The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up
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! For Italian readers, RailsConfLive is a remarkable resource too. Alternatively, Gregg Pollack’s set of videos, including “Railsconf in 36 minutes.”
Interviews
Quite a few informal interviews took place at the conference, mostly by the guys from GotThingsDone. Worth watching are Geoffrey Grosenbach, John Straw, Ola Bini, Ryan Singer, Joel Spolsky, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jeremy Kemper, and Chris Wanstrath.
Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy also interviewed Obie Fernandez, Chu Yeow, Amy Hoy, Michael “Koz” Koziarski, David Heinemeier Hansson, Bruce Williams, and Ninh Bui.
Selection of Presentations
Note: You can download the presentation files used by some of the speakers from the official RailsConf site.
DHH Keynote: Thanks to Daniel Wanja, you can watch David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote presentation. It’s a bit of a shaky video and only made up of extracts, so it jumps a bit too. I imagine a better video will be available soon. Essentially, DHH moves from technical concerns to becoming a self-help and health advisor.
RailsConf 2008 Welcome Keynote: The welcome keynote, featuring Chad Fowler, David Heinemeier Hansson and Joel Spolsky is up on YouTube.
Ruby Heroes: RailsConf 2008 marked the inauguration of the “Ruby Hero” award. The ultimate winners were Evan Weaver, Tom Copeland, James Edward Gray II, Ilya Grigorik, Yehuda Katz and Ryan Bates. You can watch the video of the awards presentation at Vimeo.
Getting Git: Scott Chacon did a talk on “Getting Git”. It perhaps sets the record for number of slides at 520 covered in 55 minutes.
The Other mod_rails - Deployment with JRuby: Nick Sieger did a presentation about using JRuby to deploy Rails applications.
Pastie: Josh Goebel did a presentation about the popular Pastie source-code-pasting site.
Microapps for Fun and Profit: Erik Kastner talked about developing very small “microapps” using Rails.
Assembling Pages Last: Aaron Batalion presented on edge caching with Rails.
Advanced RESTful Rails: Ben Scofield covers the use of REST with Rails and includes lots of simple code examples. Perhaps the slides lack a lot of what happened in the presentation, but this seems like basic REST stuff than “advanced” so it’s well worth a read even if you don’t use REST yet.
Scaling Ruby from the Inside Out: Ezra Zygmuntowicz on scaling Ruby, and Vertebra a new “next generation cloud computing / automation framework.”
Scaling Rails Panel: A panel of Blaine Cook, Bradley Taylor, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Jim Meyer and Kevin Lawver talk about the issues when scaling Rails applications.
Railsconf in 36 Minutes: Not a presentation, but roving reporter Gregg Pollack went around and asked a lot of the presenters to summarize their talks in 30 seconds. It makes for a great summary of the conference. It features the interviews linked above too.
Lightning Talk Summaries: A summary of the lightning talks given at the conference.
The RailsConf Message Board
It seems to be a tradition at Ruby / Rails conferences to put up a big “message board” for people to write / graffiti on as they see fit. RailsConf 08 was no exception. Vinícius Manhães Teles has taken a great high-resolution picture of the board. Messages include promotion for a new Gem called gitjour, codesmack.com t-shirts and a crazy number of requests for Rails developers (Zappos.com, Engine Yard, AideRSS, Synaptic Mash, Grockit, XMinute and Intridea are all hiring!).
Announcements
Rails 2.1 Launched: Rails 2.1 was officially launched. More about this on Ruby Inside in the next couple of days!
Passenger 2.0 - Now supporting Rack: Phusion announced that Passenger 2.0 (now supporting Rack!) and “Ruby Enterprise” 1.0 would be released today.
MagLev - A New Ruby VM: Avi Bryant and Bob Walker of GemStone revealed details surrounding their cutting-edge Ruby virtual machine, MagLev. Drew Blas posts with his opinions direct from the talk. Avi Bryant has posted some more detailed notes. Giles Bowkett steps it all up a bit.
TuneUp: FiveRuns announced TuneUp, a community-supported application performance profiling application.
Blog Posts
RailsConf Day 1 Wrap-Up by Dan Pickett
Quick RailsConf Update by Josh Susser. On the Joel Spolsky keynote: “If you missed it, count yourself lucky.“
Railsconf Highlights by Nick Plante
RailsConf - the retrospective by Eric Gelinas
RailsConf 2008 Retrospective by Dary
RailsConf08: Meta-programming Ruby for Fun and Profit by Nate Murray
Notes from the JRuby Q & A by Nick Sieger
Miscellaneous
Mentions of RailsConf on Twitter
Feel free to post any links, references, or notes of your own regarding RailsConf 2008!
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!
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.
Deploying Rails Applications: The Book
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. Monitoring, source control, and automated deployment (using Capistrano) are also discussed.
For those who’d rather squint endlessly at the screen than fondle finely pressed tree flesh, Pragmatic Bookshelf have a PDF version available for $22.
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.
Rails 2.1 Release Candidate 1 Released
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. There’s already a lot of activity.
This post is sponsored by Rails Kits — Looking to build a subscription-based or membership web site with Rails? Use the SaaS Rails Kit to skip having to write the billing code. Instead of starting from scratch, start with subscription management and recurring billing all ready to go.
The Best of RubyFlow - April 24 to May 5, 2008
RubyFlow - the community based companion site to Ruby Inside - has been on fire! I’m finding out about lots of new stuff on there that then gets included into Ruby Inside posts. It’s the place to be if you want the most up to date Ruby and Rails news, but don’t mind putting up with a bit of ‘noise’.
Every two weeks or so I’m going to summarize some of the best items from RubyFlow here on Ruby Inside, so that you can still keep up with the latest developments even if you don’t want to be soaked in the firehose of Ruby news over there.
For the period April 24 to May 5, 2008:
Net::SSH 2.0 Released: Jamis Buck announces the release of Net::SSH 2.0 and the availability of Net::SFTP 2.0, Net::SCP 1.0, Net::SSH::Gateway 1.0 and Net::SSH::Multi 1.0.
Webistrano 1.3: Webistrano 1.3 has been released; read the announcement. Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.
Automatic Migration Generator: Hobofields is an automatic migration generator for Rails / ActiveRecord users. Annotate your model with the fields required as you go, then Hobofields generates the required migrations.
Capistrano 2.3.0: Yehey! Capistrano 2.3.0 is released. It has many new tasty features!
Rails 2.1 Features: A summary of some of the nice new features coming in Rails 2.1. In short, many of the rough spots are being patched over!
Ruby and TextMate: An interesting introduction to TextMate’s Ruby bundle. A good place to start if you use TextMate but haven’t used any of the mnemonics and snippets the Ruby bundle provides (like me).
John Lam on Iron Ruby: A video update on Iron Ruby from John Lam recorded by David Laribee.
MetricFu: Jake Scruggs demonstrates how to use MetricFu to produce good looking metrics and reporting for your Rails application.
Merb Blogging Software: Announcing Feather, a Merb based blogging engine with a lightweight core framework, and a robust set of plugins, now open source and ready for contributions!
Parsing Quoted Strings: If you need to parse quoted strings in Ruby, a lesser-known module called Shellwords from the Ruby Standard Library is a handy utility.
New Relic: A New, $3.5 Million Funded Player in the Rails Application Monitoring Space
New Relic is a new entrant into the nascent Ruby on Rails® application monitoring market, so far dominated by FiveRuns. The company has just taken $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from heavyweights Benchmark Capital. Rather impressively, New Relic has already been featured on TechCrunch, where writer Mark McGranaghan notes that New Relic’s founder, Lewis Cirne, previously ran a similar company in the Java space.
New Relic’s primary product at this time is “RPM,” a subscription-based Rails “Performance Management” solution. It provides useful information that Rails developers can use to quickly detect, diagnose and fix application performance problems. There are a lot of pretty graphs and charts on the RPM product page from which you get an idea of what sort of information it presents.
It is worth noting, however, that FiveRuns’ RM-Manage appears to provide more features at the moment, although without knowing New Relic’s pricing, it may still be better value depending on your needs. RM-Manage not only provides live Rails application monitoring, but also overall server monitoring (including OS, database, Web daemon, swap usage, etc.), as well as triggers and events to automatically notify you of changes or issues. I’ve also heard from a credible source that FiveRuns has some exciting new enhancements in the pipeline, due to be unveiled at RailsConf.
New Relic’s launch is newsworthy, however, not only because of the investment (something matched in the Ruby / Rails scene by FiveRuns and Engine Yard) but because the hype surrounding its launch demonstrates that both the press and investors are now seeing plays in the Ruby and Rails space as serious business rather than quirky gambles.
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.)
Registration Open for Scotland on Rails
The registration process for Scotland on Rails, the UK’s first Rails-dedicated conference, has gone live. The event takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland on Friday 4th and Saturday 5th April, and comes just days after both Euruko 2008 (Czech Republic) and Ruby Fools (Denmark & Norway), so might help you form the perfect trifecta! Registration is £180 (€241 or $350).
For a regional conference, Scotland on Rails has done extremely well on the speaker front, with Michael Koziarski, David Black, Giles Bowkett, Martin Sadler, Tammer Saleh, Jim Weirich and Bruce Williams speaking amongst others. A list of talks is available for your perusal.
Obie Fernandez’s HashRocket Builds Your Web App In 3 Days
Community celebrity, all round Rails good guy, and The Rails Way author Obie Fernandez writes in with news about his latest venture, HashRocket, a Rails-powered Web application development agency on steroids (or at least a lot of caffeine).
Their main “product” is 3-2-1 LAUNCH, a “get a site built in 3 days” affair, where you can get whatever idea it is you want to be developed sorted out by Obie and his crack team of 9 developers and various subcontractors in just three days. That’s called cooking your Agile cake and eating it! The pricing model is fixed bid, in the range of approx $30k-$60k, but you’re getting a lot for your money, since the team has many different resources to pull on, including stockpiled library code, Flash exports, visual design talent, and so forth. You’ll also receive help with finding a qualified developer or team to take over the work once your week with HashRocket is up.
The second product is RESCUE MISSION, a service where HashRocket will fix badly-implemented Rails projects. If you’re unhappy with your existing developers or you’ve dug yourself into a tangled knot of Rails obfuscation, HashRocket can swoop in and sort it out.
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!
Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don't Need Separate Posts #13
Anvil (Ruby GUI App Framework) Gets an Update
A new version of Anvil, a Ruby framework for developing GUI applications, previously covered here on Ruby Inside, has been released. Lance Carlson has done a great job of making developing a basic GUI application on OS X, Windows or Linux a job that takes minutes rather than hours. All you need to do is install the Anvil gem, run a basic app generator, and a "Rails-esque" structure and basic app is created. If you haven't taken a look at Anvil yet, give it a look.
Lance Carlson also wanted to let everyone know that Anvil now includes the "widget_wrapper" gem which is a new gem focusing on "DSLing GUI toolkits" starting with WxRuby but progressing on to RubyCocoa, Swing, IronRuby, OpenGL, and so forth. Anything that makes cross-platform GUI apps easier to develop is exciting, so check it out.
Instant Rails 2.0 for Windows Released
Windows Rails developers will know of Instant Rails, a "one app installs the whole stack" type affair that installs Rails, Apache, MySQL and Ruby all in one lump, pre-configured and ready to run. Well, Instant Rails 2.0 is now available and, surprise surprise, includes Rails 2.0!
ADS Mantis - Dedicated Management of your EC2/RightScale Deployed Rails Apps
Robert Dempsey wanted to let everyone know about Atlantic Dominion Solutions' new ADS Mantis service that provides dedicated management of RightScale-deployed EC2-based Rails applications.
New Erlang / Ruby Bridge Released, "RBridge"
In May 2007, I wrote about an early stage interoperability bridge between the Erlang and Ruby programming languages called Erlectricity. I also said:
Ruby / Erlang interoperability and co-operation is likely to become a big topic in the Ruby community towards the end of the year.
That didn't really happen, and as far as I can tell, Erlectricity didn't get beyond version 0.1. Just this week, however, Chuck Vose has written in to say he's working on a new effort called RBridge that uses code from an older project called RulangBridge. He has a quick tutorial up here.
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.
RSpec 1.1 Released: Now Supports Rails 2.0
The team behind RSpec, a Behavior-Driven Development based "testing" library, have announced the release of RSpec 1.1.0. This will be of particular interest to Rails 2.0 developers as support has now been added, along with interoperability with Test::Unit. RSpec 1.1 also includes a Rails tool called "RailsStory" that allows you write "user stories" that can be tested out on the fly.
Ruby on Rails 2.0 Released
After two successful release candidate releases, Ruby on Rails™, a popular Ruby-based Web application development framework in a similar vein to Merb or Nitro, has successfully made it to the final release of version 2.0. Previously called an "evolutionary rather than revolutionary" step, Rails™ 2.0 nonetheless packs a whole ton of new features that make it a worthwhile upgrade from 1.x. Unsurprisingly, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, has the best writeup in the official launch announcement.
Also bound to be of interest to Rails 2.0 users:
Rails 2 Upgrade Notes - Some notes from Ben Smith covering the process of upgrading an application from using Ruby 1.2.6 to Rails 2.0. It includes a particularly useful Rake task to check your code for certain deprecated features.
iPhone on Rails - Ben Smith continues with a great demonstration of how to easily build iPhone-targeted applications using Rails 2.0.
Summary of Major Rails 2 Features - Ryan Daigle wraps up a stunning collection of "Edge Rails" blog posts demonstrating Rails 2.0 features many months in advance with a mega link post.
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!)
Registration For "acts_as_conference" Now Open
Robert Dempsey of non-profit Rails advocacy group, Rails For All, writes in to remind everyone about the acts_as_conference Rails conference taking place in Florida in February 2008 and to let us know that registration is now open. Tickets cost $100 (plus $2.50 booking fee). Obie Fernandez and Dan Benjamin are the keynoter speakers, but there are many others. Too many to name individually here, although Charles Nutter (JRuby), Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Merb), and Evan Phoenix (Rubinius) are particular standouts. Anyway, if you fancy getting some winter sun while doing the Rails schmooze, hit it up. It doesn't sound like you're going to be bored at this one.
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!
Ruby and Rails in Mac OS X Leopard
Someone / some people who have been responsible for integrating Ruby and Rails into the latest version of Mac OS X (Leopard) have written some notes on what was involved and how Ruby and Rails work in Leopard. The Ruby build is a customized 1.8.6 p36 and actually integrates into Xcode and Interface Builder.. now making it a relatively easy task to put together Ruby GUI apps on OS X. RubyGems is also installed with a smattering of the most popular gems preinstalled by default.
"acts_as_conference" Rails Conference in Florida, February 2008
acts_as_conference is a Rails conference taking place in Orlando, Florida on February 8 and 9, 2008, and a pretty good excuse for getting out of the cold weather up north for a couple of days. It's currently early days in the organization of the conference, so no speakers have been announced and a call for proposals is due soon. The conference is being organized by Robert Dempsey, also known for his work on Rails For All and Atlantic Dominion Solutions.
Preview Release of Rails (TM) 2.0 Goes Live
David Heinemeier Hansson gives the Rails™ community its birthday and Christmas presents all at once with the announcement of a preview release of Rails 2.0:
Behold, behold, Rails 2.0 is almost here. But before we can slap on the final stamp, we’re going to pass through a couple of trial release phases. The first is this preview release, which allows you to sample the goodies in their almost finished state.
The King goes into quite some depth and covers a wide range of different and new features that have made it into Rails 2.0.
Keep in mind that this is just a preview release, so if you're not used to living on the edge, wait a little while until the release candidates or Rails 2.0 proper. In the meantime, check out this small Ruby program that checks to see if your app is already up to scratch for Rails 2.0.
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!
How Not To Build An E-Commerce Site With Rails
Derek Sivers, quite the Rails champion when he decided to rebuild his CD Baby e-commerce site using Rails two years ago, has now admitted defeat. After two years of wrestling with Rails while building the new site, Sivers along with coder Jeremy Kemper, decided to face up to reality. Kemper went off to 37signals and Sivers rebuilt the entire site in PHP in just two months. As such, Slashdot is jumping on the bandwagon by telling developers to "think again" about using Rails in future.
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.