Vos Virtual Network » ruby on rails

JumpBox Releases Virtual Appliances for Amazon EC2

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:37:54 +0000

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

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

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

Using OpenID with Ruby on Rails

admin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:27:28 +0000

Dr. Dobbs Journal published a great article, showing how to implement OpenID for Ruby on Rails.

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

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:01:26 +0000

Ruby on Rails - Architecture

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

Wooby Wuvers Woundup

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:43:45 +0000

Scooby-Do’s way of saying “Ruby Lovers Roundup”… A quick review of recent happenings (and writings) in the Ruby development community… and what a fun round up it is! The ruby rock stars are pushing agile development in sunny Florida … and the sunny Java guy is resting from Java to talk about Ruby RSpec RESTing and testing..

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.

Jazz, Innovation, and Scripting

admin — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:44:01 +0000

Maybe you figured out that I love jazz. I enjoy many musical genres, and musical styles, but lately I’ve been really exploring jazz. In a recent article I described jazz as being full of images, mirrors, and reflections. Jazz is like a bridge — always going from someplace to another place. Jazz is always asking questions, bending notes, refactoring routines, revisiting and revising themes, and making analogies. Jazz energizes me with its innovative musical poetry of patterns, parallels and allegories.

Jazz Piano Art - found at Detroit River Days

Back in April, I started talking about creativity, innovation, improvisation … and how it relates to jazz and the blues… meditating on the mysteries of musical creativity … compared to creativity , innovation, and risk taking in other domains (like art, architecture, design, entrepreneurship, computer programming, product design, web design, etc.) … pondering the amazing results that often happen when a skilled musician begins to improvise with a good idea and the right attitude.

Surprising success and fantastic results can happen in your life (or your business) when you understand how it all works. Innovation – It’s not a new idea, and I’m not the only one talking about this. I’m just improvising on a great theme.

Nick Sieger (no relation to the Detroit rocker Bob Seger) wrote a great article in July called Jazzers and Programmers. I found Nick’s article while researching some things about Ruby on Rails, and JRuby. NIck describes the history and styles of jazz and compares it to the history and styles of programming. He talks about jazz fundamentals, and compares the rhythm section (piano, bass, and drums) to programming libraries, frameworks, and patterns. He compares Bass-Drums-Piano to Model-View-Controller. It’s really great stuff — and even includes a musical score from one of the jazz standards, Blue Monk.

Nick spiced up the article with nifty quotes from famous jazz musicians like: “It’s taken me my whole life to know what not to play” – Dizzy Gillespie … “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple” – Charles Mingus … I won’t steal anymore of Nick’s thunder. Go read the whole article.

Are you catching my drift? We’re not done with this jam session yet. I’m just taking a breather in between songs.

Rails Roundup – New Relic and Insoshi – Good Dogfood

admin — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:03:01 +0000

Scenario: You are finally convinced that Ruby on Rails is a great platform for building web applications, and so you try it out and build this awesome new website in only 3 weeks of development. You launch version 0.99 beta and everyone thinks it’s cool. Maybe it’s something like Insoshi, or Twitter. (Insoshi is hot new social networking platform (FOSS) written in Ruby on Rails (RoR). Yes, they eat their own dog food.)

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.

Ruby on Rails vs Java – RailsEnvy Video

admin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:39:23 +0000

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.

Thin

admin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:15:15 +0000

Thin is a Ruby web server that glues together 3 Ruby libraries:

the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
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 !

19 Rails Tricks for Ruby Coders

admin — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:36:53 +0000

Here are 19 Rails Tricks Most Ruby Coders Did Not Know — until the article was published… I liked the pointer about using BackgroundRB to run long running tasks (in the background).

RadRails IDE – Ruby on Rails – Tutorial

admin — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 16:42:36 +0000

RadRails is the Eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails. Learn about installing RadRails, the structure and use of the application window, and the primary steps in developing an application. Ruby on Rails has hit the big time. With that popularity has come the desire by developers for an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes Rails even more accessible. RadRails, a Eclipse-based environment, fulfills that need for many developers.

This article introduces the RadRails IDE