Rails Magnet - Attracting Rails Developers

More frustrated than usual

specialj — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 03:29:45 -0800

I’ve found myself digging through a lot of Rails code over the last few days. For some things, like building a holeless cache that might be understandable but for other things, like needing to use a charset other than UTF-8 for a column and still have things work has been troublesome. Rails is a young product so I think it’s wise to keep in mind that the documentation isn’t always accurate or complete. Still, while I enjoy reading the code of products I use from time to time, being forced to learn the internals repeatedly is frustrating.

Helpful reads for the night

specialj — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:41:17 -0800

The 2 main issues I was investigated was coming up with a holeless caching system and looking into better ways to handle css.

Plugins that make my life easier

specialj — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 04:52:00 -0800

Working today I found myself reading up a lot on a few plugins I’ve been using so I thought I’d try to get all the links to the plugins I commonly use in one place.

2 questions about attachment_fu answered

specialj — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:23:46 -0800

The former wasn’t quite what I was looking for and the latter didn’t seem to work as given but both were helpful in working quickly toward the solutions I needed.

Still searching for a great Rails frontend webserver

specialj — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:19:01 -0800

I spent many hours today evaluating various web server front-ends. So far not 1 has met all of my requirements. Most web servers proxy implementations do not work optimally for Mongrel. For Mongrel, only 1 request should be sent to an instance; any additional requests should be queued until a Mongrel server becomes available. Only Lighttpd 1.4.x with it’s “fair” scheduler and Apache 2.2.x (Event MPM ) can do this. However, Lighttpd 1.4.x does not have the ability to dynamically compress content unless patched and Apache 2.2.x (Event MPM ) does not support SSL which are both additional requirements. Apache 2.2.x (Worker and PreFork MPM) and Nginx 0.5.x can both dynamically compress content and support SSL but neither has an optimal proxy implementation.

More Rails webserver news

specialj — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:04:20 -0800

The Rails webserver world is really moving. Mongrel, Thin, and now Ebb, are all available for rails developers and rails application host managers. I decided to take a look at some recent developments with each.

Doing research on Rails caching

specialj — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:07:05 -0800

I haven’t decided on how exactly I’m going to cache an app that I’m working on so I decided to review what other people were doing to give me some ideas. It seems like the cache-fu plugin is a favorite though the Action Cache plugin gets mentioned quite a bit as well. Here are some links to pages I found useful.

Installing Eclipse with RadRails and Subclipse under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

specialj — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:31:53 -0800

Over the past few weeks I have increasingly found myself unhappy developing Rails applications in NetBeans 6. While I was initially happy with the productivity boost from moving from writing applications in nano to using a full IDE I found myself reverting to using nano. The reason was simply that NetBeans was putting too much load on my desktop system. The system isn’t exactly slow (Athlon 64 X2 4600+, 2GB RAM) yet when running NetBeans the system load was hovering between 4 and 5 making development tedious. Before trying NetBeans I had read a lot about various IDE’s and I decided to revisit that research. One consistent complement to Eclipse with RadRails was that the performance was snappy. I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than to expand my Rails IDE experiences.

Installing plugins with piston

specialj — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:00:09 -0800

I’ve read a lot of positive things about piston, a gem which can be used to manage plugins. Typically it’s used as a replacement for projects that use svn:externals to manage plugins from external repositories. I learned very quickly in my rails development work that svn:externals was an extremely problematic approach. So I tended to simply manage the plugins myself. I even went so far as to write a script which would alert me to updates in the plugins. However I decided that piston should be mature enough at this point to try in a project. Here’s how it went.

A new web server for rails - and it is Thin

specialj — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:15:36 -0800

I’m looking forward to trying out Thin, a new web server for rails that’s built on Rack, Event Machine, and the Mongrel parser. The one downside of mongrel is that it does consume more memory that I would prefer and Thin may use somewhat less and deliver more speed. Thin isn’t ready for production yet as it doesn’t handle static content (page caching and static html files) and such features may cause it to lose some of its speed. But it sounds like a well designed project and any performance increase, especially under high concurrency loads, will be most welcome.