Ruby on Rails Planet

Announcement: New Engine Yard Private Cloud Infrastructure »

Created at: 11.02.2010 18:30, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News Engine Yard Cloud Terremark

Today is an exciting day at Engine Yard, and I wanted you hear about it from me first. We’ve selected Terremark, a major hosting and infrastructure provider, to provide the infrastructure for our next generation private cloud services.

For Engine Yard Cloud (Amazon Web Services) customers, this move will have no impact on you whatsoever.

When we opened for business more than three years ago, racking and stacking our own hardware wasn’t really a choice: being self-funded well before the concept of cloud computing existed, doing it ourselves was the only way we could introduce our customers to our vision for application deployment and management.

How times have changed! Infrastructure vendors now agree with most of the concepts that we pioneered back then, eliminating the need for us to do it ourselves. We’ve always felt that specializing in Ruby on Rails and the surrounding stack would allow us to make deploying and scaling Rails applications as easy and efficient as it is to create those applications.

Today’s announcement will allow us to further focus on enabling our customers to leverage today’s and tomorrow’s rapidly evolving infrastructure and providing the best Rails Platform-as-a-Service technologies and support.

While there are many advantages to the Terremark infrastructure, we’re most excited about their sophisticated fibre-channel storage area network. The Terremark SAN affords greater reliability and substantially higher throughput than our current storage system; we know that our customers will see great benefit and peace of mind from this.

Terremark has an excellent track record supporting the needs of large enterprise and federal government agencies. Their datacenters have SAS 70 level II, PCI and HIPAA certifications, and we’re confident that our private cloud customers will find this new infrastructure meets the most demanding application requirements.

Over the next six months, we will migrate all current Slice, Fractional Cluster and Dedicated Cluster environments that currently reside on the Engine Yard private cloud to Terremark.

At a high level, not much will change for our private cloud customers. In particular, I want to emphasize that there are no changes in your support team or support processes.

Based on our extensive planning with Terremark, we expect migrations to require minimal effort for our private cloud customers.

If you’re a private cloud customer, you will hear from your Engine Yard account manager in the next few weeks to discuss a migration plan that makes sense for you.

New, Free To Use, Public Domain Rails Logos »

Created at: 05.02.2010 06:33, source: Rails Inside, tagged: News

Did you know that the Rails 3.0 beta / pre-release went live today? No? You do now! Anyway, I had to do a post about it for Ruby Inside and was sick of not being able to find a logo without a silly license or that's encumbered by trademarks. So I got one of the world's top logo designers to make one that I could release to the public domain.

Two versions are available. A big one and a little one! But you can resize it with an up to date raster image editor like NeoPaint or Deluxe Paint V! Cleverly the world renowned designer changed the "A" of Rails to a heart so it doesn't actually use the trademarked name, and he really knows how to use the bevel feature on Deluxe Paint V, doesn't he?

It's key to note that this logo is not officially sanctioned by the trademark holder and, well, it has no relationship to the trademark at all. Except if you believe it does. That's for your consciousness to figure out for itself. Either way, this ain't official!

Big Version

Small Version

You can use this logo however you like - it's public domain. Claim you made it if you want! In fact, maybe we didn't make it and we're claiming we made it.. who cares!

For the whiners, an alternative:

Erik O's Actually Pretty Good Logo

302b6f8.jpg.png

Dylan Clendenin's (@deepthawtz) Logo

Tweet This Post

MacRuby 0.5 Released: A Significant, Stable Release »

Created at: 02.02.2010 02:23, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News OS X Specific

MacRuby has hit a significant milestone in its development today: version 0.5! The key features include improved HotCocoa support (though this is now maintained separately from core on GitHub), better Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and support for OS X 10.6's Grand Central Dispatch.

Give It A Go!

If you've got a Mac and haven't yet tried out MacRuby, give it a go - its speed and general level of support for Ruby is very impressive. You can download MacRuby as a standalone package with installer (for OS X 10.6 and higher) or if you're using RVM, do an update and then rvm install macruby to get the latest nightly build. Matt Aimonetti, of the MacRuby project, reassures us that "MacRuby is namespaced and won’t affect your current Ruby installations" - but RVM is still an option, nonetheless.

Once you give MacRuby a try, check out HotCocoa too (installed with macgem install hotcocoa). It's a library that acts as a "Ruby layer" between Cocoa and MacRuby. Instead of wrestling with Cocoa's classes and verbose method names, HotCocoa wraps up Cocoa in a big, warm blanket of familiar Ruby. Take this very simple "throw a window with a button on the screen" app, for example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'hotcocoa'

include HotCocoa

application do |app|
  win = window :size => [100,50]
  b = button :title => 'Hello'
  b.on_action { puts 'World!' }
  win << b
end

Will the iPad support MacRuby?

Matt says "No." The problem isn't a lack of desire or interest, but that the iPhone OS (also used on the iPad) doesn't do automatic garbage collection or have BridgeSupport support - both of which are needed for MacRuby. Supposedly, though, contributors are looking into ways to circumvent these issues, but I'm more hopeful of GC support in iPhone OS 4.0..

[ruby inside news] Peter here! My next "big thing" is a new site called coder.io. If you're into technologies like Ruby, Git, Python, the iPhone, MySQL, JavaScript, Clojure, etc, you might want to get on the coming sooon list :-) There should hopefully be some freebies/bonuses along with exclusive early access. Thanks!

The Rails Envy Podcast Becomes.. The Ruby Show »

Created at: 26.01.2010 02:33, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Controversy News

If you try to keep up with the Ruby community you're probably familiar with the Rails Envy podcast, even if you aren't subscribed. Well, it's just relaunched as.. The Ruby Show, hosted by Jason Seifer and Dan Benjamin. They plan to cover the latest Ruby related news on a weekly basis in a similar style to Rails Envy. New episodes come out each Wednesday.

The latest episode of The Ruby Show includes bits on Cramp, the Rails 3 Bug Mash, Friendly, Rails 3 Generators, ActiveModel, and more.

The Background: Rails Envy was a weekly podcast by Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer and featured Ruby and Rails news interspersed with comedy bits. The podcast did really well, getting about 7000 subscribers within two years, but for some reason, Gregg and Jason stopped working together and Gregg went off to found Ruby 5, a new bite-sized Ruby news podcast delivering 5 minute episodes once or twice a week.

Dan Benjamin Enters Stage Left: Undeterred by the split, Jason kept the Rails Envy brand and brought podcasting genius Dan "voice for radio" Benjamin on board to co-host. To my surprise, the podcast got even better and has made for entertaining listening, even when Dan did an entire episode on his own.

Go Check It Out: Podcasts aren't for everyone, but Dan and Jason are doing a great job, so at least check out an episode or two from time to time. You're usually guaranteed a laugh.

And before anyone asks, no, that picture isn't of them. Well, the heads are, but I superimposed them on to other people using Photoshop. Why? Because this is timely news and Jason didn't provide a picture quick enough ;-)

Rails Magazine Issue 5 Available (Free) »

Created at: 04.01.2010 02:46, source: Rails Inside, tagged: books Elsewhere News

Rails Magazine editor Olympiu Metiu has let us know that the fifth issue of Rails Magazine is now available for free in PDF format. If you're not familiar with the magazine, check out our video review of the first issue to get a feel for what it's about.