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

The author, Jeremy Weiskotten, demonstrates how an OpenID consumer can be implemented using the Ruby on Rails framework. The article provides a short tutorial explaining how OpenID single sign on works, and why it’s important. Next it discusses several issues and complications. The final section provides a solid demonstration tutorial, with plenty of Ruby code examples and some screen shots.

Ruby on Rails - Architecture

Ruby on Rails Architectural Diagram – from Niwatori image-photo-stream on Picasa

Tim Bray took a break from his other stuff to run more RSpec tests. Is he RESTing or testing, or both at the same time? He’s misusing RSpec (like Andy McKee abuses the guitar) — and that kind of innovation could lead to a cool new invention — but only if he plays with it long enough to discover something new and interesting.

Obie Fernandez is pushing paired programming the HashRocket way. Looks like they are having fun with it, and getting some good results. True believers in agile programming methods are already doing this, and everyone else is watching it closely, or closing their eyes, and trying to ignore it with one pragmatic eye still open.

David H. Hansson was not really “thinking out loud”, but he recently twittered:

getdropbox.com is exactly what I need to complete the two computer conundrum. Great execution. Can’t wait to be able to pay for it.

DHH also released Rails 2.1.1 — with lots of little bug fixes.

Dave Thomas is having fun with procs in Ruby 1.9

Michael Galpin talked about rapid prototyping with Apache Derby and JRuby on Rails over on IBM developerworks.

Did I mention that JRuby 1.1.4 was released? –  with a 2-20x increase in speed for most features

John Lam (the Microsoft IronRuby guy) helps you connect the dots and solve the really big problems in this video captured at the last RubyFringe.

Nick Sieger talks about jazzing things up with JRuby in this InfoQ video interview.

… and from the awesome fresh news department … enjoy the awesome fresh rails documentation.

Scene 2: TechCrunch posts an article telling the world about your cool RoR Open Source Social Networking stuff. This is great free publicity, but can your application handle the TechCrunch effect? Will your RoR Social Networking application be able to handle the spike in traffic? Can you handle the success of becoming a very popular new application? (Rumor mill… Twitter is having scaling problems… said to be abandoning Ruby on Rails. However DHH, the master architect of RoR, joined Twitter as D2H on 29-Apr-2008, and instantly had over 1200 followers.)

Scene 3: Slashdot comes back online after being down for 5 hours, and someone posts an article about your hot beta site — sez its cool. Will it suffer from the Slashdot effect? How will your application perform under peak load? Does it scale up to handle thousands or millions of hits per hour?

Scene 4: You can’t handle the TechCrunch effect and Slashdot effect all on the same day. Your web site crashes and burns. Your dream, website, and reputation is ruined — all in one day.

Scene 5: You wake up from the nightmare. It was only dream. It’s morning. You make some coffee and read the technology news. You check out the new Ruby on Rails performance monitoring tool from New Relic, and you listen to the Mashable podcast interview of Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. Lew says they wrote the New Relic performance monitoring tool using Ruby, so he’s proud to say they eat their own dog food.

Scene 6: You get back to work — a little wiser.

Google goes green today with an alternate logo to celebrate Earth Day, which the USA started celebrating on April 22, 1970.

Michael Arrington says Twitter is now such a vital part of the technology ecology, that service outages barely matter, and as he says “I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.”

Wired Magazine looks back to frightful days in World War I, remembering the trench warfare — chemical weapons; poison gas — on this day in 1915.

I’m thankful to be alive on the privileged planet today, and I realize that every breath is a gift. I need the earth more than the earth needs me… I need more oxygen, just like SlashDot needs more electricity to keep the creation/evolution debate going.

Yesterday, WordPress wizard Matt Mullenweg, jazzed up his blog with a new spring theme. I wonder if he designed it that way, or it just evolved by itself.

Zeldman (ALA) published a couple interesting and helpful articles on the Why and How of Ruby on Rails this morning.

Creating new stuff isn’t easy. Meticulous and beautiful designs don’t just happen by accident. Computer programs don’t write themselves. However, some scientists (like Richard Dawkins) theorize that DNA wrote itself. So, if you follow that theory, you can Twine your PC to some random Twitter feeds, go to the beach all afternoon, and when you get back, your new Ruby on Rails program will have written itself. Try explaining that one to your boss. Or better yet, find some VCs who will invest in it. (The only catch is that they might have to wait billions and billions of years for the ROI). That plan might work for you… but for programmers looking for some good advice today, you might want to check out StackOverflow.com (a new advice service for programmers) — from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

Back to the Planet – After a flaming descent, and a “scary crash landing”, Korean, Russian, and American astronauts are glad to be back on planet earth after a visit to the International Space Station. Yi So-yeon, a nano-technology engineer from Seoul, Korea — spent 11 days in space. Peggy Whitson had been gone for 192 days (and needed help walking), and now Peggy holds the American record for most days lived in outer space — 377 days.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

The video is kind of funny, and does reveal some tidbits of truth about the complexity of enterprise java development. But those who have been reading about Ruby and JRuby for a while realize that you can run Ruby and Ruby On Rails with Java.

But if you think about it… guess that goes to show you there’s a-lotta-truth here.

1. the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
2. Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
3. Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

So, Thin is the new dog in town. Did I mention that Thin is fast and flexible?

Thank-you Marc Cournoyer !

The PeepCode ScreenCasts are also highly recommended… “PeepCode Screencasts are a high-intensity way to learn Ruby on Rails website development”.

Wait a minute!!! That RubyConf is not the REAL RailsConf — which will happen May 17 to 20, 2007 — check it out on the RailsConf website.

The first package I tried was v1.3, and I was impressed with how easy it was to download, unzip, and get Ruby, PHP, mySQL, and Apache up and running. In addition to the great new Ruby tools, you get PHP, mySQL, and phpMyAdmin in the install package, because that is the quickest way to configure an OpenSource management tool for your mySQL databases.

Includes Mongrel 1.0.1 support.

Very cool. Highly recommended.