Ruby on Rails Planet

Rolling out new updates for Rails Boxcar »

Created at: 29.01.2009 07:30, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails ruby PLANET ARGON rails rubyonrails railsboxcar boxcar deployment hosting phusion ruby enterprise REE

Alex, Director of Deployment Services, has been hard at work helping us get our new suite of hosting plans out for Rails Boxcar, a deployment environment that we’ve designed to help you get your Ruby on Rails applications running as painless and quickly as possible. With this new announcement, we’ve rebuilt the Boxcar image based on the feedback of our existing customers.

Additionally, we’ve been looking over some of early results from the Ruby on Rails Hosting in 2009 Survey that we’ve been running the past few weeks, which has further boosted our confidence that we’re on the right track with this big change.

What are some of the changes?

Moving to Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE)
Moving to Passenger (mod_rails) by default
All-new pricing structure! (starting at $35/month)

This means that with a Rails Boxcar, you can now get a pre-configured deployment environment using some of the most efficient platforms for hosting your Ruby on Rails applications. (REE has shown to increase performance by 33% in some cases)

We’re really excited about this new setup and would like to invite you all to check out our new plans and send us any questions that you might have.

Visit RailsBoxcar.com

Rails Hosting Survey - 5 days left... »

Created at: 27.01.2009 18:52, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails ruby hosting rubyonrails rails survey community

Wow. Thanks to all of you who have helped get the word out about the Ruby on Rails Hosting 2009 Survey. We just passed 900 people and we have about five more days left to hit the 1500 milestone that I set for myself.

If you can spare five minutes to help us reach this goal, we’d really appreciate it.

Here is a quick sample of the questions that we’re asking the community.

Where is your source code hosted?
Which database do you typically use in production?
which performance monitoring tool do you use?
How much of your monthly budget is allocated for deployment and hosting expenses?
So, can Rails scale? ;)

Don’t hesitate… we only have a few days left!

For more information, read the original post, Take the Ruby on Rails Hosting in 2009 Survey.

Announcing Golden Gate Ruby Conference »

Created at: 23.01.2009 04:47, source: has_many :through, tagged: conference events ruby

This has been a long time coming, and I'm very happy to finally be able to announce the first ever Golden Gate Ruby Conference, here in San Francisco on April 17 and 18. There's so much interest in Ruby here in SF, and tons of Ruby mojo too, so it's about time we had our own conference! We'll be bringing in some great speakers from all over so locals who don't get to travel to conferences can get exposed to stuff they can't usually see. And we'll also have some of our high-powered local talent showing off their stuff too.

While this has been in the works for a while, there are still a few details to work out before we can talk about things like registration, price, our speaker lineup, etc. But we wanted to get the word out as soon as we had firm dates so people could get it on their calendars. And there's still a lot we can talk about...

The organizers of the conference are yours truly, Josh Susser ("the has_many :through guy"), and Leah Silber, conference addict and the woman Yehuda Katz was lucky enough to marry. Yehuda is going to be helping me with the technical program too. Our employers, Pivotal Labs and Engine Yard are already committed to sponsor the conference, so we know we have plenty of support to make it happen. There are still a lot of opportunities to get involved as a volunteer or a sponsor, and we're actively looking for both.

Our approach to this conference is not to take anything as a given. We're rebels, we're bucking the system, we're using instance_eval to leave out explicit receivers! For starters, there will be no call for proposals for talks. The program will consist of invited talks, and talks selected by attendee voting. We'll be setting up a site soon where talks can be proposed and voted on.

We've also got a GitHub account set up as a one-stop place where you can find all the code talked about at the conference, and a place to put stuff we may be hacking on over the weekend. Of course you can follow the conference on twitter, and we'll have a blog set up soon enough.

We're shooting for 150-200 people, single track, about a dozen talks, plenty of "hallway track" time, and a few surprises.

If you want to get involved, volunteer or sponsor, the email addresses on gogaruco.com are the best way to contact us.

Looking forward to this. You have no idea...

Rails Hosting Survey (continued) »

Created at: 16.01.2009 01:36, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails ruby hosting survey rubyonrails rails

Thanks to everyone has taken the survey and mentioned it on twitter. We just passed 400 people. We have a ways to go before we hit our goal of at least 1500 people surveyed. (if we can get even more than that… great!)

The survey is taking most people less than 5 minutes to complete, so if you haven’t filled it out yet and have experience deploying Ruby on Rails applications, here’s a link. :-)

Any help that you can provide in getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Question: Plugins or Gems? (or both?) »

Created at: 13.01.2009 21:56, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails ruby programming question rubyonrails rails gems plugins

Our development team likes to extract reusable pieces of code for our projects and have historically used plugins. However, we are finding more and more people releasing these sorts of modules/components/patterns as gems.

Which do you prefer and why?

If you use both, how do you decide to use plugins or gems?