Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

We have just released the first binary version of Apache Olio for both the PHP and Rails implementation. Both implementations have been tested quite thoroughly now and we think they are robust enough for serious use - especially for performance testing the workloads.

I introduced Olio in a previous post. It is a toolkit that includes a sample web2.0 application implemented in both PHP and Rails that includes a load generator to drive load against the application.

Please visit the Olio site and download the kits. If you find it interesting, I invite you to come join the project.

We have just released the first binary version of Apache Olio for both the PHP and Rails implementation. Both implementations have been tested quite thoroughly now and we think they are robust enough for serious use - especially for performance testing the workloads.

I introduced Olio in a previous post. It is a toolkit that includes a sample web2.0 application implemented in both PHP and Rails that includes a load generator to drive load against the application.

Please visit the Olio site and download the kits. If you find it interesting, I invite you to come join the project.

A couple interesting things coming out of startup land.

For one, Posterous has a little writeup on Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way. Good things to take away include using Sphinx/Solr for search, but the real important takeaway for the MySQL crowd is Storage engine matters, and you should probably use InnoDB. If you’re writing an application, know your storage engines. There are also bits to tell you how to use query_viewer and New Relic to help you fix database bottlenecks, use memcached later, and more. Its a great read.

Next up, there’s How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. I hope Bret from FriendFeed writes more on their infrastructure over …

loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).

Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).

After a short time of writing our loops in more …

Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.

So, first of all I would like to explain what kind of interviews I really hate Ever since I was thinking of myself as of a developer (many years ago) and was going to “software developer position” interviews I really hated questions like “What is the name and possible values of the third parameter of the function some_freakin_weird_func() from some_weird.h” or “How to declare a virtual destructor and when it could be useful?”… All my life I had pretty practical thinking and never bothered to learn APIs or some really deep language concepts that are useful in 1% of …

Hi all,

Arun Gupta has blogged about a webinar he did on MySQL, NetBeans, and JRuby-on-Rails. Be sure to check this out.

The webinar has been recorded, so you can check it out when you have time. Here is the link:

MySQL/NetBeans/JRuby-on-Rails Webinar.

Enjoy.

Cheers!

--James

I was invited to give a short introduction to Ruby on Rails at Tech Meetup in Edinburgh a couple of days ago. I’d been racking my brain for days on what to talk about — 15 minutes is too short for me to give a meaningful introduction to Rails — and eventually settled on telling a few stories.

The slides don’t make much sense on their own, so I’ve included the “script” of what I talked about too. I deviated quite a bit from the script as I got into it, so hopefully I should be able to provide audio (or, dread the thought, maybe even video) of the talk in due course.

Intro

I’m Graeme. I’m the Managing Director of Rubaidh Ltd, and have been developing Ruby on Rails applications professionally for 3 years now.

Telling Stories

To be honest, I didn’t know what my audience this evening was going to be like. I wasn’t sure if …

I had first seen the interesting Rails logo in a talk by Terry Chay, while I was at OSCON, a few months ago.

Now, my esteemed colleague Jay Pipes has it on his laptop. It seems they’re making stickers, even.

Otherwise, my next task is to revamp our Ruby content. Currently, it looks a little sad. It has to at least be as good as Using MySQL With Ruby, no?