jTribe's Pow Wow

The OpenHub after 2 Months

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:37:02 +1100

What a ride!
We opened our doors in October for the first members to join and officially launched the in early December 2007. Current status: Finished the re-furbishment and ready operate. The place has seen several builders who built our meeting room, installed the alarm system and finshed bits and pieces. Thank you to all the members who did put up with the noise during that time. The Wii Console, coffee machine and microwave make the place now a bit more social. We have 14 workstations with 6 full-time members, some part-time members and several day-pass members.

The OpenHub website was launched (www.openhub.com.au). Members can use the new website to book desks and pay membership fees. Some more iterations of the website are planned for the first quater of 2008.

What's next?
We want to sign-up additional members within the next 2 months to cover operational costs and make sure that Coworking in Melbourne is here to stay.

I have to say it was really fun to see the OpenHub shaping up. A big thanks to the members who joined so far who make the place a nice place to work.

OpenHub has a home!

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:02:19 +1000

We have been on the verge of announcing this for a few weeks now, but finally it's official. We have signed a lease on a great space at 140 Queen st! It's got some excellent natural light with it being quite a long shape running along the windows looking out onto Queen st (and the Turf bar). As you come off the lifts you can see straight inside through a good amount of glass.

The builders are currently in there working to remove all the old fittings, putting in new carpet and repainting it. We are putting together an office layout which we will handover to have construction start quite soon. So it's still a work in progress but we're looking ok for our November 1st opening!

Follow up from OpenHub Info Night

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 10:00:58 +1000

Thanks to everyone that attended the OpenHub information night last Monday. We had a great turnout of over 20 people and plenty of good ideas to make the space even better. I think the toughest part for most people was being able to visualise the space and how that would work. I therefore promised to follow up with some links to existing spaces that we can aspire to (not all of these are coworking spaces).

I have also put most of the information we presented onto our website here -http://www.jtribe.com.au/openhub, and uploaded some pictures of the info night. Right now we are working to secure a physical location and are getting very close. We are still on track to open November 1st.

[Reminder] OpenHub Information night is tonight!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 23:50:50 +1000

Just a quick reminder that The OpenHub information night is on tonight at 5pm. All the details are on the website. If you haven't RSVP'ed then please do so at - http://www.jtribe.com.au/openhub/rsvp

Tonight will be a great opportunity to meet like-minded people looking to work together, find out all the details, ask all of your questions and provide us with your suggestions for what would make a coworking space great.

See you tonight!

Rails on WebSphere?

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:36:23 +1000

For a Java/Rails shop like ours, it has been important for us to watch the emergence of JRuby. Sometimes using Rails is the correct choice for a customer that traditionally has been deploying Java applications. Being able to deploy Rails directly into their existing Java infrastructure removes a huge barrier to entry. I recently tried out the most unlikely partnership of Rails and IBM's WebSphere to see firstly if it would even work, and secondly how easy it was to achieve.

JRuby is a Java library that allows you to run Ruby code inside the JVM. In order to run Rails applications with JRuby you require Goldspike. Firstly, Goldspike is a Rails plugin that provides some rake tasks to simplify the creation of Java WAR files which can be directly deployed into J2EE containers. These tasks allow for various deployment situations and are easy and powerful to use (as I'll demonstrate shortly).

Secondly, Goldspike is a Java library that contains two servlets and a context listener, along with a generated web.xml file. The context listener initialises a pool of useable JRuby environments that can be used to service requests. A FileServlet handles all incoming requests by first looking to find the requested file to serve directly (such as images, css, javascript etc). If this file cannot be found the request is forwarded onto the RailsServlet. This servlet retrieves a JRuby runtime from the pool and uses it to service the request, writing out the response from JRuby to the servlet output stream.

I successfully tried out several jTribe Rails projects running within WebSphere 6.1 using IBM's development IDE, Rational Application Developer 7.0.0.3. I found a good set of instructions on the JRuby wiki and have condensed them into a set appropriate for porting an existing Rails/MySQL application to run inside RAD 7 and WAS 6.1.

* Install the ActiveRecord JDBC bridge by running:

gem install activerecord-jdbc --no-rdoc --no-ri

* Make sure the Java bin folder is in the path (used for jar). ie. set PATH=%PATH%;%JAVA_HOME%\bin

* Checkout your Rails project (eg, svn export )

* Install the JRuby to Rails plugin by running the command below from inside your Rails project:

ruby script\plugin install hip://jruby-extras.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/rails-integration/plugins/goldspike

* Ensure the MySQL JDBC driver is part of the WAR file by editing config\web.rb to include the line below (uncomment)

maven_library 'mysql', 'mysql-connector-java', '5.0.4'

* Change production database properties for JDBC by editing config\database.yml as below

production:
adapter: jdbc
driver: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/
username:
password:
host: localhost

* Ensure the Active Record JDBC bridge is loaded by editing config\environment.rb and insert before "Rails::Initializer.run do |config|"

if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /java/
require 'rubygems'
gem 'ActiveRecord-JDBC'
require 'jdbc_adapter'
end

* From inside your Rails project run rake war:standalone:create

* You should see a file called ".war"

* Open Rational Application Developer (7) and use a new workspace

* From Project Explorer, right click -> import - > WAR file

* Select your ".war" file (leaving the defaults) and click finish

* Wait for RAD to finish importing .....

* Right click on the web project, Properties -> Web Project Seiings and change it to become / then click OK

* Right click on the web project, Run As -> Run on Server (leaving the defaults) and click finish

* When Websphere has finished loading you should see your Rails application running in a browser inside RAD on Websphere

This excercise was only to test how smooth or convoluted the process might be, as well as test if the JRuby/Rails integration worked with WebSphere. My next challenge will be to deploy a few J2EE instances (probably on Amazon's EC2) and see how a JRuby/Rails application will handle some load.

Announcing The OpenHub Information Night

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:13:21 +1000

Entrepreneurs, independents, freelancers, startups and small business. While these styles of employment bring great freedom, they also can bring a lot of isolation. Sharing office space, or coworking, has become a popular way of overcoming this isolation and putting these individuals into part of a community while still maintaining their employment freedoms. The coworking wiki has a lot great examples of how this trend is growing across the world and we here at jTribe want Melbourne to be part of this trend.

Over the past few months we have been working towards creating a shared office/coworking space within the Melbourne CBD. We are now at a stage where we can start sharing more details to a larger audience. We would therefore like to invite any interested people to attend our information night on Monday, September 17th at 5pm. This will be a great chance to not only meet us, ask questions and get all the details, but also to meet what could be your future coworking buddies.

All the details are on The OpenHub invite page and we ask that you please register so we can plan space and refreshments.

Rolling your own RSS feed

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:27:18 +1000

It seems the Rails version of "Hello World" is to build a blog and that's just what we did for our jTribe website. Six years ago I started with some HTML I updated manually, then moved onto a homegrown JSP/Servlet application. Lately I've been using MoveableType and that's been just great. However being able to build just enough function for what we needed was really refreshing.

Mostly the application is quite boring, but it does get more interesting when it comes to creating an RSS feed. I knew I had a choice between creating a static feed (where a file is generated and served up by the webserver outside Rails) and a dynamic feed (where the feed is generated on the fly when requested). I also knew that most feedreaders are smart enough to use conditional HTTP gets to save our poor bandwidth. When a feed is being read by multiple clients every 30 mins it is sensible to only provide the client with the actual feed data when it has been updated. Ideally the server is sent a time (in If-Modified-Since) which is used to determine if to respond with the RSS feed contents or a HTTP code 304 saying the client's version of the feed is up to date.

I see the guys at 43things.com implemented their own simple conditional get handling, while others used Rails page caching. Both seemed nice enough but I wanted a solution that served up a static file outside of Rails, that was preserved between subsequent deployments of the site, and required minimal webserver (in our case lighttpd) configuration. In the end I chose to utilise Amazon's S3 storage service to hold the RSS feed, uploading a new version each time a blog entry is published. Then I wrapped the S3 link with feedburner so I still get all the subscription and usage statistics. So armed with a dozen lines of code I have created a RSS feed (the RSS classes in the standard Ruby library are fine) and uploaded it to Amazon S3.

We're big fans of the Amazon services here at jTribe (except when we, ok I, forget to shutdown EC2 instances), so expect to see more adventures around these services on this blog in the near future.

Welcome to the jTribe blog!

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:01:36 +1000

Welcome to our tribal gathering. We've got some exciting things planned over the coming months and we want this to be the place where we can start talking about them. Take a look over at the About Us page to get an idea of who are the people behind jTribe and the authors of this blog. Then go over to our References page to see what projects we are working on. We hope along the way we can share our technical challenges and even give readers a sneak peak at the latest projects going on around jTribe. So point your feed reader to our RSS feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/jtribe and enjoy the updates.