bgror

Engine Yard University, Rails, and the Lucky 13 »

Created at: 08.12.2010 02:12, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized education training

Engine Yard University is offering a virtual training class, 13 days from today, on December 20th. The Zero to Rails 3 training course provides a strong foundation for programmers interested in joining the ranks of our awesome Rails community. The class will be led by Abie Hadjitarkhani, a colleague I met 13 years ago through Allaire Corporation, the folks behind ColdFusion. Tools like Perl, ASP, and ColdFusion brought developers, like Abie and me, into the age of the Internet, and gave us a baseline for understanding why Ruby is now the language of the Cloud. A sample of our attendee list shows a ton of Ruby / Rails interest among Java engineers. Maybe this is due to the momentum of JRuby, a technology for programmers wanting to use Ruby while leveraging a decade's worth of Java libraries. If you use Java, it is a great time to check out Ruby, improve your skills, marketability, and hourly rate! For an overview of JRuby check out Nick Sieger's JRuby Webinar next week. He'll explain what Ruby, Rails and JRuby can do to make your life easier as a Java developer. To sign up for the four day virtual training course, visit the Zero to Rails 3 registration page. Here are 13 topics we will delve into during 4 jam packed days:

1. Local Development
2. Gems
3. Ruby
4. Test Driven Development
5. Views, Helpers & Layouts
6. Models in depth
7. Controllers, CRUD, and REST
8. Configuration
9. Mailers
10. Plugins
11. Metrics & Instrumentation
12. Debugging
13. Caching

Webinar: Connecting the Worlds of Java and Ruby with JRuby »

Created at: 07.12.2010 22:25, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events education jruby ruby Webinar

Since my very first encounter with JRuby, I've always felt that JRuby is best viewed as a bridge. A bridge connecting Java and Ruby. A bridge introducing Ruby's innovations to the Java world while giving all that legacy Java code running out there a new lease on life. This view may seem obvious to all of you who already know (and love!) Ruby and JRuby, but there are many Java developers out there to whom it is not. We're making a new effort to engage with these folks. We'll start with a series of webinars focusing on bringing Ruby to the Java world. For those of you who are Rubyists or regular readers of the Engine Yard blog, the content will most likely not be anything new. We're reaching out to you because we know you love Ruby and want to help Ruby continue to succeed and find new enthusiasts. So if you have friends or colleagues who are Java programmers that haven't heard the Ruby message, please pass this along and encourage them to check out the first webinar in the series that I'll be leading next week. *Webinar:* *JRuby - Connecting the Worlds of Java and Ruby* *Date: Tuesday, December 14th, 2010* *Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM Pacific* The content will be a very high-level overview of Ruby and JRuby for Java developers, including:

• An introduction to the Ruby language: Learn how Ruby can make you more productive and write more readable and maintainable code

• An introduction to Rails: Learn how it speeds up web development

• An introduction to JRuby: Learn how to integrate existing Java code with just a few of lines of Ruby and how to use JRuby to extend existing Java applications with Ruby on Rails

Virtualize This – Instant Rails in a Virtual Box »

Created at: 03.12.2010 10:02, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events Technology education training vagrant

Engine Yard employees are all about virtualization. At Thanksgiving dinner, vegan Rubyist Martin Emde nibbled on a virtual turkey. Application engineer and telecommuter, Kevin Rutten, embarks on a virtual commute every morning as he ambles down the hallway to his home office. And of course, our Ruby on Rails Platform would not be possible without game changing virtualization technology like vSphere, XenServer, and Xen. Our training team, Engine Yard University, will also be using virtualization. We decided to offer our next Zero to Rails 3 Ruby on Rails class virtually, as opposed to physically, to eliminate the expense and inconvenience of travel. In building this class, we wanted to provide a practice environment for Rails development, with zero configuration involved. But how could we do this on a student's machine that we do not control? The solution was Vagrant, a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments, by Mitchell Hashimoto. Using Vagrant, we built a headless VM that runs a full Ruby on Rails stack for local development. Since it includes Ubuntu, it is a big download, weighing in at around 400 megs, but the problem it solves is worth every byte. A week after building the Vagrant Ruby/Rails VM, we recognized that Vagrant solves many problems outside the context of our curriculum. Engine Yard has been referring people to Vagrant for a number of reasons. With Vagrant, you get:

• A perfectly controlled development environment to be shared between staff
• Something that works on Windows (32-bit), OS/X and Linux - wherever VirtualBox runs
• A preconfigured, locally shared, folder
• The ability to edit files in the VM using TextMate, Eclipse, Notepad++, etc.
• Automatic port forwarding to easily browse an application, or other services
• SSH without the hassle of usernames or passwords
• Scriptable configuration using Chef.

Installation Instructions

• Download and install VirtualBox
• Install Ruby. For Mac, Ruby and Rubygems are already installed. For Windows use the RubyInstaller.
• On a command line, install Vagrant:

  gem install vagrant

• Download Engine Yard University's Vagrant environment and unzip it.
• On a command line, use CD to change directories into the folder you created via unzip.
• Load the VM

vagrant box add eyu package.box

• Start the environment

vagrant up

• Login (no username / password needed) using:

vagrant ssh

Note: Windows users need to do a bit of Putty configuration described here.
• Test your environment by creating a Rails app

rails new zagnut

• Change directories to your Rails app

cd zagnut

• Start the application

script/rails server

• Open a browser and navigate to the http://localhost:3033
• You will see the standard welcome to Rails web page
• In the command line, stop the server by pressing ctrl-c
• Exit the environment

exit

• Shutdown the environment

  vagrant destroy

Congratulations!