Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...

Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.
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http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/date/20080208 Friday February 08, 2008

acts_as_conference 2008 - Day 1 Report

acts_as_conference started earlier today (now yesterday) in Orlando, Florida with Charity Session.  Completely sold out with 165 attendees!


Ezra Zybmuntowicz (Merb core developer) talked about Merb.

What is Merb ?
  • Started after tried to make Rails thread-safe and memory foot print lower.
  • All (everything?) you need, none you don't.
  • Key features of Merb are: Thread-safe, ORM-agnostic, JavaScript-library agnostic, and Template language agnostic.
  • Replacement for ActionPack.
  • Similar to Rails, fixes a bunch of problems like performance, memory collection.
  • 2000 requests/second
  • merb-core, merb-more, merb-plugins are some of the key components.
Read more about Why Merb ? (Speed, Lighweight, Powerful). In later discussions, Ezra told me that somebody on #merb IRC channel has already tried Merb on GlassFish. I'm certainly waiting for him to provide me more information on that. Unfortunately I could not find the chat archives :(

Then Evan Phonix (started Rubinius) talked about the "Ruby kernel written in Ruby". He talked about how Rubinius is a community-driven implementation (90 committers in last 365 days) and building a rich and high-performance environment for running Ruby code.

In the welcome session, Robert Dempsey explained the two goals for the conference - "wide & deep on variety of topics" and "technologies that integrate with Ruby". Here are some statistics presented:
  • 30-70 people for every Rails meetup
  • Orlando #16, Tampa #17 for Rails jobs
And some more gathered during another session:
  • 90% using Rails as part of job
  • 50% first time visitors to any Rails conf
  • 50% local to Orlando
The last session of the day was a nice talk by Dan Benjamin on "Simplicity". I enjoyed his metaphors for emphasizing how simplicity in user interface is important to meet customer's requirement and keep him happy. Here are the two quotes he used: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" by Einstein and "Simplicity is the key to happiness in the modern world" by Dalai Lama.

The party at Orlando Ale House was a good blast. Here are some pictures:

And finally the day ended with dinner @ GOL! The Taste of Brazil - highly recommended with a great variety of salads and meat. I particularly enjoyed Lime & Strawberry Caipirinha.

In next few hours, stay tuned for Charlie's session on JRuby and Brian's talk on NetBeans/Ruby tomorrow. You can always come and talk to me about GlassFish/JRuby - an "eco friendly" alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel at Sun booth. If not there, I'm sitting in back of the room :)

And we are also giving away 5 copies of Agile Web Development with Rails: 2nd Edition in sweepstakes tomorrow, right after Brian's talk.

The complete album is available at:

Follow the conference at twitter - acts_as_conf or IRC - #actsasconf.

Technorati: conf jruby ruby actsasconf rubyonrails glassfish netbeans

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[3]

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Rails Quick Start Seminar - San Francisco, Feb 20-21, 2008

Rails Quick Start Seminar, Feb 20-21, San Francisco
Sun Microsystems is a sponsor of a new Ruby on Rails seminar. Michael Slater and Christopher Haupt, of BuildingWebApps.com and the LearningRails.com podcast, are offering a two-day Ruby on Rails QuickStart seminar in San Francisco, February 20-21. The seminar is designed to enable web designers and developers with only minimal programming experience to become productive Rails developers.

Attendees will learn how to build Ruby on Rails applications using the NetBeans IDE. They will receive a complete Ruby on Rails site they can use as the basis for their own designs, with deployment scripts and a trial hosting account. The key topics include:

  • The Rails approach to web site design
  • Basics of Ruby: just enough to get going with Rails
  • Using Rails layouts and partials
  • Building forms with validation
  • Easy Ajax with Prototype, Scriptaculous, and RJS
  • Working with the database through Active Record
  • Testing and debugging
  • Deploying to production
Once again ...

Event: Ruby on Rails QuickStart Seminar, agenda
Date: Feb 20-21
Location: San Francisco, CA (hotel)

Register now!

Technorati: conf rubyonrails learningrails seminar railsquickstart

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[3]

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GlassFish v3 Ruby Gem - New Home on RubyForge

Ruby Forge Icon GlassFish v3 Gem allows JRuby-on-Rails application to be launched in GlassFish v3 server. It provides a robust alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel for development and deployment of your JRuby-on-Rails applications.

UPDATE (Feb 14): A 0.1.1 version of the gem is released which will change the installation process.

The Gem was originally announced here and then updated here. All along, the Gem was living a nomadic life on download.java.net. Now it has found a permanent home on http://rubyforge.org/projects/glassfishgem/. We are excited to release version 0.1.0 of Gem co-located with other standard gems such as RubyGems, Rails and RMagick. This new and permanent home provides a much more seamless installation of v3 gem. Here are the highlights:
  • The Gem replaces WEBrick as the development container and a pack of Mongrels front-ended by light-weight Web server + Capistrano for management by one command and one process (think "eco-friendly").
  • Works with both JRuby 1.0.3 and JRuby 1.1RC1.
  • Multiple applications can be deployed in one instance of gem, each in their own context root and running on separate ports (details below).
  • Each application can serve multiple requests concurrently. This can be configured by the number of JRuby runtimes using -J-Djruby.runtime as a command-line property (details below).
  • The applications deployed on this Gem can easily make use of pooled resources such as database connections as explained in TOTD #9.
  • The released version is 0.1.0. Even though a preview version of Gem was released earlier, the version number is starting from scratch because of the newly found permanent home. 
  • Installing the Gem is a seamless and integrated process as explained below.
How to install the Gem ?

After you've downloaded and unzipped JRuby 1.0.3, go to JRUBY_HOME directory and install the gem by giving the following command:

bin/jruby -S gem install GlassFish
Need to update 24 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org
........................
complete
Select which gem to install for your platform (java)
 1. GlassFish 0.1.0 (java)
 2. Skip this gem
 3. Cancel installation
> 1
Successfully installed GlassFish-0.1.0-java

Once the gem is installed, "glassfish_rails" script is available in JRUBY_HOME/bin directory. The exact same commands work for installing the gem in JRuby 1.1RC1 as well.

How to deploy an application on Gem ?

TOTD #24 shows how to develop a JRuby-on-Rails applications with JRuby 1.0.3 and JRuby 1.1 RC1 and tested using WEBrick. To deploy these applications on the newly installed gem, use the following command:

cd .. (go to parent directory of the application)
jruby -S glassfish_rails hello

Now the app is deployed at "http://localhost:8080/hello/say/hello".

How to configure the number of concurrent requests ?

The default number of concurrent requests that can be handled by an application deployed Gem is 1. If your application hosted on the Gem needs to handle concurrent requests then you need to specify the command-line option "-J-Djruby.runtime=NNN", where NNN is the number of expected concurrent requests. For example, if your application needs to handle 4 concurrent requests then the command to host your application will look like:

jruby -J-Djruby.runtime=4 -S glassfish_rails hello

How to host multiple applications ?

Multiple applications can be hosted on GlassFish gem by modifying the default port number on which the Gem is started. The ports that need to be changed are: "http-listener-1", "http-listener-2" and "admin-listener".

For now, the port numbers need to be modified by manually editing "jruby-1.0.3/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/GlassFish-0.1.0-java/domains/domain1/config/domain.xml" file. Search for the string in first column, replace the port attribute of that XML element with the value in second column and the third column shows the default value:

Search String New Port Default
http-listener-1 8081 8080
http-listener-2 8182 8181
admin-listener 4849 4848

Any subsequent application deployed on GlassFish gem will now be hosted on http://localhost:8081/<context-root>/<controller>/<view> where <context-root> is the name of your Rails application.

A command-line switch, similar "-J-Djruby.rutime" will be provided in the near future.

Please use the gem and send us feedback on GlassFish forums, dev@glassfish or gem mailing list.

File issues in JIRA or GlassFish Issue Tracker.

Technorati: ruby jruby glassfish v3 gem rubyforge

Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0  |  Comments[18]

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