Category Archives: Webdesignology

Webdesignology is the study of internet web designing, and web architecture.

Bitnami Ruby Stack Testing

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I loaded the latest Bitnami Ruby Stack (RubyStack 1.5-2) on my personal Windows-XP development machine this morning. I say loaded, because there is very little configuration that needs to be done.  The bonus (for me) is that I get Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1 plus a complete Ruby on Rails environment and upgrades for many other packages in the full stack. This is my first time running Ruby 1.9, so I look forward to trying that out.  It’s a hefty package to download and install (225MB), but the Bitnami/Bitrock installer makes configuring your Ruby on Rails development (or test) environment as easy as riding a bike, or falling off a log.  Just hop on and ride — or fall off and roll (depending on your favorite metaphor).

Here’s a listing of the major components that are included in this FOSS (Free Open Source Software) stack.

  • Ruby 1.8.7
  • Ruby 1.9.1
  • RubyGems 1.3.4
  • Rails 2.3.2
  • ImageMagick 6.5.2-9
  • Subversion 1.6.2
  • SQLite 3.5.1
  • MySQL 5.1.30
  • Apache 2.2.11
  • PHP 5.2.8
  • phpMyAdmin 2.11.9.4
  • Git 1.6.3.1
  • Nginx 0.7.59

Lot’s of great choices and options make this “a very powerfull stack.”  Bitnami’s latest RubyStack (RubyStack 1.5-2) goes above and beyond to give you a full Ruby environment (for the two latest stable releases of Ruby), a PHP environment, two SQL database servers, two web servers, and two version control services. Wow! All that, and it only takes a few minutes to configure and install.

I’ll be using the Bitnami stack (with Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9.1) as a test environment while working on the Ruby and Rails book reviews I mentioned yesterday.

More Ruby Books in My Queue

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After several months of quietness, I’m gearing up for a burst of new book reviews.

Here’s a brief summary of some tasty new treats in the Ruby lineup:

  1. Learning Rails (Rails from the Outside In) by Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill, published by O’Reilly Media (See Learning Rails book cover and O’Reilly catalog description here.)
  2. Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts (Useful Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems) by Steve Pugh, published by No Starch Press (the Finest in Geek Entertainment). You can download a PDF of chapter 1, “General Purpose Utilities”.
  3. Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails by Maik Schmidt, published by Pragmatic Programmers
  4. Programming Ruby 1.9 (The newly updated Pragmatic Programmers Guide, aka the Pick-Axe book), by Dave Thomas with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt, published by The Pragmatic Programmers
  5. Agile Web Development With Rails (Third Edition) by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Justin Gehtland, James Duncan Davidson, and Andreas Schwarz

I hope you are enjoying your summer reading as much as I am.  What new books are you reading?

Explosive Combination: SEO, Blogging, and Social Media – Create Powerful Marketing Results

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Internet marketing slides from today’s HubSpot webinar about Inbound Marketing.

How to combine SEO, blogging, and social media for powerful marketing results.

“Here is a breakdown of an easy three-part campaign that any marketer can easily adopt into his or her own strategy.”

JumpBox Releases Virtual Appliances for Amazon EC2

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Look ma, no hardware. Twelve applications are available as free public AMIs, JumpBox customers can deploy all 38 virtual appliances.

JumpBox

JumpBox

Tempe, Ariz.  (Press Release) ~ December 17, 2008 — JumpBox, publisher of virtual appliances which provide the easiest way to trial, develop, and deploy applications, today announced the release of 38 Open Source applications to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The release enables server application deployment, configuration, and management almost completely independent of any user hardware.

Organizations have long sought to empower themselves with software that enhances productivity,” says Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox. “JumpBox now offers the ability to do so without procuring hardware, or downloading any software at all.”

JumpBox offers small to mid-sized organizations a library of Open Source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service.  Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for twelve JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free. AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to plus and premium subscribers to JumpBox Open.

“The combination of JumpBox and EC2 signals a new era of agility and flexibility for virtualized organizations,” says Staken. “Imagine enabling better customer service almost instantly with SugarCRM or deploying a Ruby on Rails application for testing in minutes. EC2 provides cost effective, scalable computing power; JumpBox provides the application packaged for instant deployment.”

A JumpBox packages an application’s software, dependencies, and application data into a single virtual application that deploys in minutes locally, or hosted to major computing, virtualization, and cloud computing platforms. Among other enhanced features, a JumpBox provides an intuitive user interface to quickly guide users through deployment, a web-based control panel for simplified management of system functions, and a backup system that enables data security and portability.

For more information, visit JumpBox on the web at http://www.jumpbox.com

All brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

JumpBox Media Contact:
Steven Shaffer
JumpBox, Inc.
http://www.jumpbox.com
480.967.5897