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RailsConf 2009 report

By Sean Schofield
May 14, 2009

RailsConf 2009 concluded last week so its time for me to talk about some of the highlights for my fellow teammates that could not make it. I think one of the more interesting talks was given by Yehuda Katz. The talk was on the “Russian Doll Pattern” and dealt with mountable apps in the upcoming Rails 3.0 release (slides available here.) Even though he felt like it wasn’t his best talk I thought it was quite interesting. Personally, I thought it was refreshing to see something that was not yet complete. The Rails core team should do more of this kind of thing as it provides the community a chance to give feedback on features before they’re set in stone.

The Rails Envy guys were there and gave a very interesting presentation about innovations in Rails this past year. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Spree made this list and they even included the new interface in their screenshots. Gregg made some excellent videos from the conference as well which capture some of the spirit of the conference.

This year I had a chance to meet Fabio Akita in person. Fabio has a great blog called Akita on Rails which has a huge following in Brazil. He also does a lot of interesting in-depth …

Operating system upgrades

By Jon Jensen
May 12, 2009

This won’t be earth-shattering news to anyone, I hope, but I’m pleased to report that two recent operating system upgrades went very well.

I upgraded a laptop from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, and it’s the smoothest I’ve ever had the process go. The only problem of any kind was that the package download process stalled on the last of 1700+ files downloaded, and I had to restart the upgrade, but all the cached files were still there and on reboot everything worked including my two-monitor setup, goofy laptop audio chipset, wireless networking, crypto filesystem, and everything else.

I also upgraded an OpenBSD 4.3 server that is a firewall, NAT router, DHCP server, and DNS server, to OpenBSD 4.5. It was the first time I used the in-place upgrade with no special boot media and fetching packages over the network, as per the bsd.rd instructions, and it went fine. Then the extra packages that were there before had to be upgraded separately as per the FAQ on pkg updates. I initially scripted some munging of pkg_info’s output, not realizing I could simply run pkg_add -u and it updates all packages.

There was one hangup upgrading zsh, which I just removed and reinstalled. Everything else went fine, …

Spree at RailsConf

By Steph Skardal
May 11, 2009

Last week at RailsConf 2009, the Spree folks from End Point conducted a Birds of a Feather session to discuss Spree, an End Point sponsored open source rails ecommerce platform. Below is some of the dialog from the discussion (paraphrased).

Crowd: “How difficult is it to get Spree up and running from start to finish?”

Spree Crew: “This depends on the level of customization. If a customer simple needs to reskin the site, this shouldn’t take more than a week (hopefully much less than a full week). If the customer needs specific functionality that is not included in core functionality or extensions, you may need to spend some time developing an extension.”

Crowd: “How difficult is it to develop extensions in Spree?”

Spree Crew: “Spree extension work is based on the work of the Radiant community. Extensions are mini-applications: they allow you to drop a pre-built application into spree to override or insert new functionality. Documentation for extensions is available at the spree github wiki. We also plan to release more extensive Spree Guides documentation based on Rails Guides soon.”

Spree Crew: “How did you hear about Spree?”

Crowd: “My client and I found it via search engines. My …

TLS Server Name Indication

By Jon Jensen
May 8, 2009

I came across a few discussions of the TLS extension “Server Name Indication”, which would allow hosting more than one “secure” (https) website per IP address/TCP port combination. The best summary of the state of things is (surprise, surprise) the Wikipedia Server Name Indication article. There are more details about client and server software support for SNI in Zachary Schneider’s blog post and Daniel Lange’s blog post.

I don’t recall hearing about this before, but if I did I probably dismissed as being irrelevant at the time because there would’ve been almost no support in either clients or servers. But now that all major browsers on all operating systems support SNI except some on Windows XP it may be worth keeping an eye on this.

Yes, IE on Windows XP is still a huge contingent and thus a huge hurdle. But maybe Microsoft will backport SNI support to XP. Even if just for IE 7 and later. Or maybe we’ll have to wait a few more years till the next Windows operating system (hopefully) displaces XP. Here’s a case where the low popularity of Vista (which supports SNI) is hurting the rest of us.

I’m really looking forward to the flexibility of name-based virtual hosting for https that …

Rails Optimization @RailsConf

By Steph Skardal
May 7, 2009

On the second day of RailsConf 2009, I attended a talk on Advanced Performance Optimization of Rails Applications. Although it was reminiscent of college as I felt compelled to write down and memorize lots of trivial information, I appreciate that I can actually apply the information. Below is a performance checklist for advanced optimization techniques covered in the talk.

Rails optimization:

• Use eager loading (investigate the virtual attributes plugin)
• Avoid string callbacks
• Minimize view instances of the object and use template inlining. Objects passed through partials can add up and be expensive.

Ruby optimization:

• Date is 16* slower than Time
• Use Date::Performance
• Avoid the string+= method, Use string« method instead
• Compare like objects—​comparing different types of objects is expensive.

Database optimization:

• Use explain analyze
• Use any(array ()) instead of in()
• Push conditions into subselects and joins—​postgresql doesn’t do that for you.

Environment Optimization:

• Buy more memory, optimize memory, set memory limits for mongrel (with monit)
• Competing for memory cache is expensive on a shared server (must avoid database in cold state)
• Use live debugging tools …

Cinco de Rails

By Steph Skardal
May 6, 2009

Today was my first day of sessions at @railsconf. In fact, it was my first time at a technical conference and RailsConf. And because I am a relatively new to Rails development, I took away a plethora of information. I wrote down some notes on things I want to read, investigate, and research more about after the conference.

1) History of Rails Critics

David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote touched on how it’s interesting to look back at some of the initial and ongoing rails critiques, such as “Ruby/Rails isn’t scalable”, “Rails isn’t enterprise-ready”, etc. and how arguments in support of Rails have grown stronger over time with the maturity of the platform. I’d like to spend some more time looking into some of these comments to be more aware of these issues.

2) Rails 3 Release

Anticipation builds in the Rails community for the announcement of Rails 3. I just recently joined the Rails development community in January and hadn’t heard of the Rails vs. Merb debate until recently. I am interested in learning more about Merb and the background of the Rails/Merb merge.

3) PostRank

Appealing to my search engine optimization background, “social media measuring” offered at PostRank essentially …

Stuff you can do with the PageRank algorithm

By Sonny Cook
May 6, 2009

I’ve attended several interesting talks so far on my first day of RailsConf, but the one that got me the most excited to go out and start trying to shoehorn it into my projects was Building Mini Google in Ruby by Ilya Grigorik.

In terms of doing Google-like stuff (which I’m not especially interested in doing), there are three steps, which occur in order of increasing level of interestingness. They are:

• Crawling (mundane)
• Indexing (sort of interesting)
• Rank (neato)

Passing over crawling, Indexing is sort of interesting. You can do it yourself if you care about the problem, or you can hand it over to something like ferret or sphinx. I expect it’s probably time for me to invest some time investigating the use of one or more of these, since I’ve already gone up and down the do it yourself road.

The interesting bit, and the fascinating focus of Ilya’s presentation were the explanation of the PageRank algorithm and the implementation details as well as some application ideas. Hopefully I don’t mess this up too badly, but as I understand it, it simplifies down to something like this.

A page is ranked to some degree by how many other pages link to it. This is a bit too simple, though, …

Announcing SpreeCamps.com hosting

By Jon Jensen
May 5, 2009

On day two of RailsConf 2009, we are pleased to announce our new SpreeCamps.com hosting service. SpreeCamps is the quickest way to get started developing your new e-commerce website with Ruby on Rails and Spree and easily deploy it into production.

You get the latest Spree 0.8.0 that was just released yesterday, as part of a fully configured environment built on the best industry-standard open-source software: CentOS, Ruby on Rails, your choice of PostgreSQL or MySQL, Apache, Passenger, Git, and DevCamps. Your system is harmonized and pre-installed on high-performance hardware, so you can simply sign up and start coding today.

SpreeCamps gives you a 64-bit virtual private server and include backups, your own preconfigured iptables firewall, ping and ssh monitoring, and DNS. We also include a benefit unheard of in the virtual private server space: Out of the box we enforce an SELinux security policy that protects you against many types of unforeseen security vulnerabilities, and is configured to work with Passenger, Rails, and Spree.

SpreeCamps’ built-in DevCamps system gives you development and staging environments that make it easy to work together in teams, show others your work …