Ruby on Rails Planet

Engine Yard Cloud Out Loud S01E05: Crafting Rails Applications »

Created at: 15.01.2011 01:59, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized cloud out loud podcast

This week on Cloud Out Loud find out why José Valim, Rails core team member and author of the Pragmatic Programmers book Crafting Rails Applications might have a career in singing if he ever quits writing kick ass Ruby code. We discuss his work on Rails as part of Google’s Summer of Code and get his advice on getting involved with open source. He also shares effective techniques for presenting at OSS conferences.

We’ll be offering a *$@#&*( huge discount on Crafting Rails Applications in an upcoming R(*)TFM, so don’t miss out. Get on the email list. Get on the twitterz. Get the discount when it drops.

Check out Applicake's Ruby LipDub blog post here.

Engine Yard Cloud Out Loud S01E04: And Then There Was Engine Yard »

Created at: 07.01.2011 23:40, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized cloud out loud podcast

This week on Cloud Out Loud, Danish Khan interviews Tom Mornini, co-founder of this fine conglomeration of hardworking people that we call Engine Yard. I found his insights into business and tech very compelling. His profound passion for Ruby on Rails really comes through when he speaks about the evolution of Engine Yard as a necessary reaction to the explosive growth of the community. We all know that Ruby developers are committed to pragmatism and efficiency, and Tom's no-BS attitude is a reflection of the values that make this ecosystem a great thing to be a part of. Thanks, Tom, for reminding our listeners why Engine Yard exists--quite simply, because we love Ruby on Rails. Tune in to get a taste of Tom's ethos. Check out this awesome video of Tom declaring Engine Yard officially out of the hardware business.

Happy New Year (and 0.4.0) from fog! »

Created at: 06.01.2011 20:28, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized fog

I'm rocking in 2011 with a bang today by pushing a big "minor" release of fog. For those not following along at home, fog is a provider agnostic cloud services library for Ruby. If you are a Rubyist using (or considering using) cloud services, look no further, we have you covered with one API for any cloud.

Contributors, Contributors, Contributors

One of the most exciting changes has been the reaching the height of over 40 contributors, keep up the awesome work everybody! We have fixed tons of bugs, improved docs and added loads of features. So without further ado I'll summarize the new hotness.

New Providers and Services

First off, several new services have joined the fog family, as well as a few notable additions to the existing services:

AWS IAM service for access control of Amazon credentials was added
AWS storage (S3) gained CDN custom origin support and multipart uploads
AWS compute (EC2) gained support for tags and searching resources by filters
New DNS API with support for AWS, Linode, Slicehost and Zerigo
Brightbox contributed a ton of code for their new (still in beta) compute offering
GoGrid compute has just gotten off the ground, with plenty left to work on

Smaller Memory Usage and Safer Credentials

As the number of services continues to grow I have been working hard to keep things nicely organized. Toward that goal we have a few additions. Now more than ever fog tries not to load parts of itself (or other gems) unless it needs them, allowing fog to use even less memory and start up faster. To encourage the best practice of keeping your credentials safely outside your code, it is now easier to setup and use a yaml credential file. You can now use Fog::AWS::Compute.new with no arguments if you have a valid credential file supplied (default is ~/.fog). To use a different credential file just call Fog.credentials_path = 'path/to/credentials'.

Focus on Services

Another big change has been focusing on services more than providers, as mentioned above. New service level initializers simply take a :provideralong with the normal credentials, and if you have your credentials file setup all you'll need to specify is the provider:

  Fog::Compute.new(:provider => 'AWS')
  Fog::DNS.new(:provider => 'AWS')
  Fog::Storage.new(:provider => 'AWS')

Along with the initializers I have done a great deal of work to smooth out even more differences between the services (especially for storage and DNS). You can see the recommended interoperable way of working with dns and storage in the examples directory. These examples and many tests are now shared between providers to ensure compatibility and interoperability moving forward.

Community Grows Up

There were a few non-code changes as well. We gained a mailing list where you can see the release notes for all the patch versions, the #ruby-fog irc channel, and we're @fog on Twitter if you have questions. We gave out shirts, and added directions on how to score them to the README (in case you are curious). And we started on a webpage for fog, it still needs a lot of work but you can help by contributing to the gh-pages branch.

Sponsors

Since September Engine Yard has given me the awesome opportunity to work full time on fog. I can't thank them enough for the whirlwind, hectic, but ultimately amazing experience. Engine Yard goes above and beyond paying the bills, helping me get to conferences and covering the awesome stickers and shirts. Also thank you to Bluebox, Brightbox and GoGrid who all graciously donate resources so that I can run tests. For the other providers I would ask that you please consider getting in touch about donating resources so that I can keep my costs down. Thanks again to everyone supporting and using fog, looking forward to another great year with my head in the clouds! ;)

Connecting the Worlds of Java and Ruby with JRuby Webinar »

Created at: 20.12.2010 22:13, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized jruby Webinar

Thanks to everyone who took the time to watch our latest webinar on Ruby, JRuby and Rails. The full video recording is now available for viewing, as are the presentation slides. We realize one hour is not sufficient time to do any of the three topics justice, so we're planning to do a series of upcoming webinars to delve deeper into specific topics. Please let us know in the comments section about specific topics you'd like addressed.

The slides from the presentation can also be downloaded. We ran out of time before getting to all your questions. Here are my responses to the questions we weren't able to field during the live webinar. What are the best communities or places to go to ask questions and learn more about JRuby on Rails? Certainly JRuby.org and the JRuby mailing lists, and to some extent the Rails mailing lists if the questions are not too JRuby-specific. We on the JRuby team also monitor JRuby-related questions on StackOverflow.com, and there is a volume of questions there already. The JRuby team also is usually present in the IRC room #jruby on irc.freenode.net, so feel free to stop by there to chat. You can also follow @jruby on Twitter to stay on top of important updates. Do you have any prediction or comments on Ruby/JRuby adoption in the enterprise in the next couple of years? I'm personally bullish on JRuby adoption and consider it part of my mission on the JRuby team to make it happen. It's hard to say in exact terms how it will increase, but a number of factors, such as the growing acceptance and maturity of Ruby and Rails, the participation at JRuby-related events, the new Using JRuby book, and the availability of knowledge, training, and documentation around Ruby and JRuby should all play a role. We also typically have a hard time knowing exactly how many people are using JRuby, because of course they're not required to tell us. We are usually surprised at conferences and meetups to hear of another organization successfully using JRuby in their own projects. Any business looking to try to inject new life into their Java-based projects should look at JRuby to help accelerate development of their systems and take advantage of the array of innovations the Ruby and Rails communities have brought to web development and cloud computing. How is the gem support in JRuby? For example, can I use Nokogiri? Gem support is generally good. For Nokogiri in particular, check out the 1.5 beta releases which will have a pure-Java backend to replace the previous issues suffered with the FFI implementation. We tend to lag a bit behind the community for releases of gems that contain C extensions. The new C extension API support in the upcoming JRuby 1.6 release will mitigate that a bit, but we also rely on the community to help us port the most popular gems when it's apparent that a Java-backed API would be more useful. How is the refactoring support in Ruby dev tools? It's not up to par with Java-based refactoring tools, but rarely do you need that level of control. Tools like RubyMine help with renaming, extraction and organization of code. Of course any refactoring exercises should be supported by a solid test suite, and fortunately Ruby has a strong culture of testing to reinforce that. We are building iPad, iPhone and Android apps in HTML5, based on jQuery. Can we use JRuby with an Engine Yard background running? Sounds like a great choice! We'd be happy to help you get up and running. How to access a Spring context from a JRuby on Rails controller? We actually have a nice JRuby on Rails article on the JRuby wiki on this topic. It should still basically work, let us know if you have any problems following it. Any info on including JRuby as a scripting framework in a NetBeans platform application? I haven't heard any specifics around NetBeans RCP development using JRuby, but it sounds like a good idea. Start with documentation on the JRuby wiki on JRuby's embedding API to get an idea of some possibilities. As always, feel free to contact us for help or more ideas. We want to hear from you.

Engine Yard Cloud Out Loud S01E02: Tammer Saleh »

Created at: 18.12.2010 03:27, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: Uncategorized podcast rails antipatterns shoulda tammer saleh Test Driven Development

If you thought we couldn't do any better than Dr. Nic, you need to listen to our interview with Tammer Saleh. Tammer was one of the Runner Ups for the top ten sexiest geeks of 2010. Who could be more attractive than this guy? Stay tuned to see if he makes the list for 2011... Tammer's Interview Engine Yard Cloud Out Loud In this podcast, Josh Hamilton talks with Tammer about Test Driven Development and Rails AntiPatterns, the new book he co-authored with Chad Pytel. If you're interested in checking out the book, you're in luck. As Randall mentioned in his R(*)TFM post, we've worked out a 35% discount for you all. To snag the discount, purchase the print or ebook here using coupon code ANTIPATTERNS at checkout. Since folks seem excited about Rails AntiPatterns, we got a hold of a couple more to giveaway. If you want one, we're giving some away on Twitter. To win a free book: # Follow @engineyard on Twitter # Retweet our original tweet linking to this post # Tweet why you *need* this book (creativity and humor encouraged) using hashtags #engineyard #R(*)TFM We'll DM winners early next week. Good luck and enjoy!