Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...
Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.
Wednesday May 06, 2009
Rails Conf 2009 Day 3 Trip Report
Attended a great talk by Michael
Bleigh on Twitter
on Rails. He has
built a gem, TwitterAuth,
that uses Twitter as authentication provider (OAuth or HTTP Basic)
which allows to to quickly and easily create
Twitter applications in Rails. In Michael's words "TwitterAuth makes Twitter Rails
apps stupid simple".
The talk built Twistener - a
Twitter application in Rails that shows how many tweepl are having a
conversation about you. A hosted version of
the application is available at twisteners.heroku.com.
The slides
and end result
of the code are always helpful.
In
a post-talk conversation he mentioned that all the gems are pure Ruby.
Any body willing to re-build the application and trying using JRuby and
GlassFish ?
And then attended Rails
3: Stepping off of the Golden Path by a "morally loose,
cheese eating surrender monkey", aka Matt Aimonetti :)
What are you going to get in Rails 3 ?
- Improved performance
- Increased modularity
- Agnosticism (choose any JS framework)
- Public API
- Mountable Apps
Some other key points highlighted in the talk were:
- More flexible, Less opinionated
- Templating engines: HAML and ERB are the big ones.
- ORM: ActiveRecord, DataMapper
- Adapaters: RDBMS, File Ssytem, IMAP, YAML, REST APIs, Custom APIs
- Sequel: Prepared statement, Sharding, highly customization SQL
- Use Hibernate with either ActionORM, JRuby
- Ability to talk to Non RDBMS Systems; GAE, CouchDB, Redis, Tokyo Cabinet, etc
Anyway here are some pictures captured earlier today:
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And then the complete album:
Rails Conf 2009 Day 3 - Chris's Keynote
An informal survey this morning at Rails Conf 2009
keynote showed:
40% Rails developers in startup
30% Rails developers in consulting
30% Rails developers work in internal projects
Engine Yard got a sponsor keynote slot and announced Flex - a cloud
computing platform on EC2 to host Rails applications. They also showed
one-button self-healing clusters. One of the speakers was particularly
scared (reminds me of my early days) and IRC#railsconf
had a pool of $125 to hug him on the stage :) Anyway, read more details
here.
The highlight of the morning was keynote by Chris Wanstrath (@defunkt). I
took multiple notes during the keynote but the transcript
has
all the details. The first part of the talk has good tips on how to
create a successful blog such as blog personality, template, killer
name and a sleek design, sparse side bar, consistency and structure,
and many others.
There was a good bashing of SourceForge towards 60% in the talk. Chris
gave a suggestion to SourceForge:
They should cut their
registration process down to a single page, remove the 200 character
"please host my project" plea, be more lenient on the categorization,
suggest an open source license for you, then allow you to change any of
these things after your project has been created.
And there are other interesting ones too. Read the full text
and enjoy!
Here were some of the Q&As at the end of keynote ...
Q. What was your inspiration for github ?
A. Inspiration is coding, doing open source software all the time,
downloading patches, relative paths were getitng in the way to coding.
Source forge registration page is too long. github is very simple for
anything code related that you want to put there.
Q. You develop these interesting pieces of software, have a job, play
guitar,
create pieces of music, drum music, how you do this in one lifetime ?
A. I outsource most of it. All of us do it, I post my music and code on
the Internet, watch a lot of TV. I'm into sharing on github. Don't have
a better work ethic, just talk a lot.
Q. What do you watch on the TV ?
A. Legend of the secret
Q. Built a bunch of tools used by non-Rubyists, how can we promote Ruby
there ?
A. RubyGems is one reason I fell in love with Ruby. Remove the friction
and lower the barrier to entry.
Q. Focus github around the code/community, it helps around the people,
opposite of Source Forge/Ruby Forge
A. Github is like facebook for code development.
Technorati: conf
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Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[0]
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Tuesday May 05, 2009
Rails Conf 2009 Day 2 Trip Report
This is a follow up post from David's
keynote.
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Attended Women
in Rails
panel discussion. The panel, Sarah
Mei, Lori
Olson, and Desi
McAdam (from L to R), had a very interesting discussion
around
the genuine problems and possible solutions of involving more women in
Rails community. |
Sarah is trying to involve more women in the San Francisco Ruby meetup. She plans to invite non-traditional audience like those who never programmed before, other language programmers, and similar. The details will be shared after performing the exercise for a year. Lori started Calgary Ruby Group. She do lot of self promotion so that younger women feel inspired. Desi is a co-founder of devChix with the purpose of "build a community of women developers". All the panelists were very vocal about being visible, having a blog and twitter presence is a good start.
Here are some random notes captured ...
Women drop out because of kids, try to get a job and then come back with a gap in the resume. It's difficult to get a new job at that time. Sarah is trying to reach out to that group who have that gap in their resume.
Visbility is important "She did that, I can do too!".
Data point: Women % in Rails community is much less than in other development community, e.g. Java or .NET world.
Another data point: % of women is more in larger companies, not in smaller companies. The reason is facilities like maternity leave, training (don't have evening hours to train themselves, can't sacrifice family time), etc.
Real stats from 2006: Women participation in open source community is 2-3%, 20-25% in "enterprise"
Appeal from the panelist "Guys, help us, tell .NET developer that Rails is not all guys, spread the word.".
Here are some Q&As captured:
Q. Should women be given free/discounted tickets to RailsConf ?
A. If women can't pay for it, then devChix can help them. RailsConf have helped before. It'll help if childcare is available.
Q. Why are we only looking at CS ? Why not other areas who have the development skills ?
A. Panel do reach out to multiple audience and seeks help from everybody in spreading the word. Women will be working on JavaScript and thinks she is designer. A guy will read 3 blog entries and thinks he is developer. There is a market salary differential between designer and developer. Women need to be more public about their programming status.
Q. Women won't present themselves as something they are not confident because they'll be called upon. How do you fix it ?
A. Everybody is learning. David's comment "I don't know everything in Rails" was commended. Girls need to know if it's important then they can figure it out. They are scared of messing the impression of their gender.
And of course there was a discussion on "Pr0ngate scandal":
Sarah: Matt is not a bad guy, he made a mistake that lot of people make in software development. If 1 out of 100 does not match the pattern of software developer, then that "1" may not be a software developer. The organizers of the conference did not do anything wrong. I voted for the talk and trust the judgement of the people. A negative feeling started developing but don't want to see that honestly. We learned something from it. As a relatively young community, this was bound to happen.
Lori: Not from the presentation itself but form the community reaction to this event. Blown out of proportion because of the same reasons when there is a conflict with developers in same company. You can't argue with somebody regarding how they feel. Can have a discussion, but argument is never going to be a win for anyone. That's where the community reaction devolved.
Desi: If Matt would've said "Oh Crap, I offended and wouldnt mean to offend you.", everything would've been fine. To David: "Next time, do us a favor and keep your mouth shut. It didn't help."
I was certainly expecting many more women to show up in the room but there were very few. Anyway, read Desi's blog entry about the panel. And I reached out to all three of them for helping in any manner :)
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I presented on Develop with Pleasure, Deploy with Fun: GlassFish and NetBeans for a better Rails experience, slides here. The several concepts in the talk are explained in the following bullets: |
- Directory-based deployment in TOTD #71, Capistrano recipes
- GlassFish Gem in TOTD #70, Capistrano recipes
- Merb support in TOTD #53
- Sinatra support in TOTD #80
- Any Rack-based framework
- nginx Deployment in TOTD #81
- Apache deployment
- WAR deployment in TOTD #73
- NetBeans Develop/Deploy/Debug in screencast #26
- JMX-based management
- Project Kenai
- JRuby/GlassFish Success Stories
- Rails Bootcamp in San Francisco on May 19/20
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The next talk of the day was JRuby: State of the Art |
Why JRuby on VM ?
- Best memory management
- Dynamic optimizations
- Reliable native threads: run threads across multiple cores
- Vast number of libraries
- Interop with Java, Scala, Rhino, Jython, ...
- Ubiquitous
- Fastest production-ready Ruby implementation
- Definitely faster than 1.8.6
- JRuby -> Bytecode -> Native code -> Optimizations
- "invokedynamic": Build fast dynamic invocation in JVM, JRuby support by June, allow Hotspot to do all optimizations across Ruby calls
- Multi-language VM "Da Vinci Machine", Optimized tail calls, continuations, fixnums, value types
- Only production-ready impl with real threads
- Ruby thread is a normal thread that can run on multiple cores
- 1 Controller/Mode/View, send 1000 reqs
- 80% less memory in 10 instance example, 96% for 20 instances
- Gem, WAR-based
- nginx, Apache: mod_proxy
FFI
- Call C functions directly from Ruby
- Portable unlike extensions
- Kenai
- Gravitor
- King Pong (JRuby wrapping MonkeyEngine)
- Oslo's Gardermoen Airport to refuel planes
- ThoughtWorks Mingle
- No cross-platform SVN libraryfor Ruby
- Bundling of installation
- Security (ecnrypting source code)
- Memory profile
- Avoiding process proliferation
- mix.oracle.com
- 5 developers, 6 weeks for all development, 2887 LOC
- Trisano: Open source infectious disease reporting system
- Ease of deployment
- Every enterprise on the planet run Java
- Extensive project roadmap
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Later in the evening, Brian Helmkamp, Aman Gupta, Luis Navena, Pat Allan, Dan Kubb, and John Nunemaker were awarded Ruby Heroes Award! |
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And the keynote by Tim Ferris,
lets not talk about it ;-) I edited pictures, authored my blog, caught
up
on email/RSS during the keynote. #railconf on IRC and twitter
were way more fun! Check the live ratings. "1" was the lowest rating that could be given anyway! |
Watch the interview on why Sea Change Affinity picked JRuby/GlassFish.
Finally watch some of the snapshots captured today:
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And then the evolving album:
Sea Change Affinity - Why JRuby/GlassFish ?
At Rails Conf
2009, Jay
McGaffigan from Sea
Change talked about why they choose JRuby/GlassFish for their
product Affinity.
Here are some of the reasons he quoted:
- Performance characterisitics (of GlassFish) have been excellent
- Picked GlassFish based upon the recommendations from the people in industry
- Dramatically more throughput on our GlassFish installation, 400 requests/sec instead of 100 requests/sec comapred to Tomcat
Read other simiar stories at glassfish+rubyonrails+stories.
Technorati: jruby rubyonrails glassfish stories
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[1]
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Rails Conf 2009 Day 2 - DHH Keynote
Rails Conf Day 2 start with DHH's
keynote. The room was packed (close to 1200 attendees) and SRO. It was
interesting to know that 70% of the attendees are first timers and only
a handful have attended for all 4 years in a row. This is my second
in the US.
Here are the notes from DHH's keynotes:
- Stop fretting about whether you are upto date with the latest in Rails. Don't need to re-write your application everytime something new comes up.
- Gallery of "normal wounds"
- Rails isn't enterprise ready, James McGovern "some consutant, architect, or bullshit title of a big company". Can't win the world with better arguments, some things take time.
- Multiple frameworks like Grails, Sails, Biscuit, Monorail seem to give the impression Java is easier
- Switch back to PHP after 2 years on Rails y Derik Severs (sp?)
- The failed whale, "the twitter debacle" that Rails doesn't scale.
- Merb - "the most credible alternative to Rails". Even though emotions can run high, the underlying principles are still the same.
- Fundamental principle of Rails are still the same, it's better and faster
- Philosophy of Rails3
- Buck up all the unicorns - it's not going to be a rewrite f everything
- No holy cows - "There is nothing secret in Rails, everything is up for public debate"
- Have tasty burgers: it's all pre-assembled and use it the default way, otherwise pick/choose whatever you like. Allow people to make individual choices and still be together in one community.
- Progress of Rails 3 - Ton of Rails 3 code in the repository, no alpha release
- New Router: Faster route by subdomains, user agents, more Route to other Rack machinery. Mount multiple applications like Sinatra and Django using this router. Much simpler routing API. "Ruby is not about fewer lines of code, it's about expressive lines of code."
- XSS protection: Flipping the convention such that all outputting views will be escaped, so "<%=raw" will not escape it and "<%" will escape it by default. HTML helpers "html_safe" may be used too.
- JavaScript goes unobstrusive and agnostic: Will adopt HTML 5 custom attributes such as "data-remote" and "data-method" attribtues will simplify "link_to_remote", "remote_form", "link_to".
- More agnosticism: Action ORM is a slim wrapper around other ORM tools, Generators (SoC project)
- Great refactoring (bulk of the work): Abstract Controller + Action Dispatch, Active Relation (also GSoC project) underpins Active Record, Cherry picking from Active Support, Speedy callbacks
- Real secret to high productivity
- Most developers treat requirements as stone tablets, don't treat requirements as gospel, instead renegotiate requirements.
- Use Twix instead of a fine Belgian chocolate, it doesn't really matter most of the time.
- Programmers are like puppies who want to fetch the same ball again and again, bark back instead
- Calling people programmer is like a blackbox, we are not those boxes. Instead we should be treated as partners, work with our stakeholders to get the job done.
Technorati: conf railsconf lasvegas keynote
Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[4]
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Rails Conf 2009, Las Vegas - Day 2 Run
Eight of us started at 6:15am this morning from the Hilton Lobby, looped
around Las Vegas
Country Club and another short loop in the neighborhood for a
total of 5.2 miles in 43:18 mins.
Interested in running together while attending Rails Conf
? Follow @railsConfRunner
and meet us at 6:15am in the Hilton lobby.
And don't forget your Tequilas - it's Cinco de
Mayo!
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Posted by Arun Gupta in Running | Comments[0]
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Monday May 04, 2009
Rails Conf 2009 - Day 1 Trip Report
Rails Conf 2009 started this morning. The first day consists of morning
and afternoon tutorials.
I attended Nick Sieger's JRuby
on Rails tutorial, the slides are available.
A survey in the room showed:
- 95% comfortable with Ruby/Rails
- 80% have used JRuby
- 10% use JRuby actively
Why JRuby ?
- JRuby is "Less Bitter Java", after all Java is a great platform.
- Concurrency (Native threading)
- Reliability (well-behaved because of Hotspot compiler, no process monitoring, etc)
- Encapsulation (take a Rails application, bundle it as a single deployable artifact that is fully contained)
- Choice (Any Java application server, huge breadth of Java libraries, and can write thin Ruby wrappers around Java libraries)
Common options
- --server: Run with server VM, better performance
- --headless: No UI
- --properties: Show tweaks for compiler, JIT compiling, thread pooling etc
- -J<java-opt>: Pass any Java properties
- -J-Xmx1G: Increase memory to 1G
Advantages: Improved versions of some Ruby APIs (tempfile, mutex, thread, timeout), 1.8 and 1.9 in a single install (jruby --1.9), Wrap Java libraries and APIs in Ruby
The slides have much more details in terms of deployment options (WAR-based, GlassFish Gem), and many other interesting details Scroll to slide #68 to understand all the guts of kenai.com - a real life application running using JRuby, Rails, and GlassFish.
The afternoon tutorial for me was A Hat Full of Tricks with Sinatra. The tutorial was completely code driven with no slides, just love that format!
The tutorial started with a brief introduction to Rack. A basic Rack application can be "config.ru" or "app.rb", lets start with "config.ru" Hello World:
| run
lambda { |env| [ 200, { 'Content-Length' => '2', 'Content-Type' => 'text/html', }, ["hi"] ] } |
Run it as ...
| ~/samples/railsconf/sinatra/basic-rack
>~/tools/jruby/bin/jruby
-S rackup [2009-05-04 13:40:18] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2009-05-04 13:40:18] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2009-03-16) [java] [2009-05-04 13:40:18] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=90964 port=9292 127.0.0.1 - - [04/May/2009 13:40:27] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2 0.0160 127.0.0.1 - - [04/May/2009 13:40:27] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 2 0.0060 127.0.0.1 - - [04/May/2009 13:40:30] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 200 2 0.0100 |
"config.ru" is the default Rackup script, otherwise need to specify the name. And now "app.rb" ..
| App
= lambda { |env| [ 200, { 'Content-Length' => '2', 'Content-Type' => 'text/html', }, ["hi"] ] } |
And run it as ...
| ~/samples/railsconf/sinatra/basic-rack
>~/tools/jruby/bin/jruby
-S rackup app.rb [2009-05-04 13:43:57] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2009-05-04 13:43:57] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2009-03-16) [java] [2009-05-04 13:43:57] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=90990 port=9292 127.0.0.1 - - [04/May/2009 13:44:09] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2 0.0110 |
In both cases, the application is accessible at "http://localhost:9292".
Change the basic "config.ru" to convert into a class as ...
| class
BasicRack def call(env) body = "Hello from a class" [ 200, { 'Content-Length' => body.size.to_s, 'Content-Type' => 'text/html', }, [body] ] end end run BasicRack.new |
and run the same way as earlier.
Change body to "env.inspect" to see an output as:
Sinatra allows reloading of application but that "feature" will be removed soon. Instead install shotgun (which does not work with JRuby yet!). Anyway, install the gem:
| ~/samples/railsconf/sinatra/basic-rack
>~/tools/jruby/bin/jruby -S gem install shotgun JRuby limited openssl loaded. gem install jruby-openssl for full support. http://wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_Builtin_OpenSSL Successfully installed configuration-0.0.5 Successfully installed launchy-0.3.3 Successfully installed shotgun-0.2 3 gems installed Installing ri documentation for launchy-0.3.3... Installing RDoc documentation for launchy-0.3.3... |
And run as:
| ~/samples/railsconf/sinatra/basic-rack
>~/tools/jruby/bin/jruby -J-Djruby.fork.enabled=true -S shotgun [2009-05-04 13:55:46] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2009-05-04 13:55:46] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2009-03-16) [java] == Shotgun starting Rack::Handler::WEBrick on localhost:9393 [2009-05-04 13:55:46] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=91089 port=9393 |
Process separate bodies depending upon the info:
| class
BasicRack def call(env) body = if env["PATH_INFO"] == "/foo" "in foo" else "in other" end [ 200, { 'Content-Length' => body.size.to_s, 'Content-Type' => 'text/html', }, [body] ] end end run BasicRack.new |
Accessing "http://localhost:9292/foo" shows "in foo" and accessing "http://localhost:9393" shows "in other".
Target application is the last application specified by "run".
Rack supports middleware which are like filters, they can applied before/after a message is processed.
Rack will initialize middleware at load, so hold on to that application as shown:
| class
BasicRackApp def call(env) body = "hello from app" [ 200, { 'Content-Length' => body.size.to_s, 'Content-Type' => 'text/html', }, [body] ] end end class MyMiddleware def initialize(app) @app = app end def call(env) @app.call(env) end end use MyMiddleware run BasicRackApp.new |
@app.call calls the next middleware in the chain.
Rack comes with couple of standard middleware, e.g.:
| use Rack::CommonLogger |
Example of an after filter:
|
def call(env) status, headers, body = @app.call(env) body.map! { |part| part.upcase} [status, headers, body] end |
Lots of other filters available.
With a basic Rack understanding, lets build a Sinatra app:
| require
'sinatra' |
is the simplest Sinatra application. Save it in a file "basic-sinatra.rb" and run it as:
| ~/samples/railsconf/sinatra/basic-sinatra
>~/tools/jruby/bin/jruby
-rubygems basic-sinatra.rb == Sinatra/0.9.1.1 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from WEBrick [2009-05-04 14:40:14] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2009-05-04 14:40:14] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2009-03-16) [java] [2009-05-04 14:40:14] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=91396 port=4567 |
The application is now available at "http://localhost:4567". BTW, this app can easily be run using GlassFish Gem as explained in TOTD #79. Add a simple GET method and "not_found" handler as:
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' not_found do 'hi from other' end get '/foo' do 'hi from foo' end |
Every time a request comes in, it builds a request context, instance evals lambda and finds the one that hits.
Sinatra takes care of status and headers, the application needs to process the body.
Another one ...
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/env' do env.inspect end |
And it shows Rack environment hash at 'http://localhost:4567".
Another one ...
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/' do end post '/' do end put '/' do end delete '/' do end |
This adds 4 HTTP methods with different routes.
No explicit render method, e.g.
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/' do content_type "application/json" { "foo" => "goo" }.to_json end |
No ".rhtml.erb" or ".json.erb", instead it's just ".erb". Add "views/index.erb" as:
| <html> <body> Hello form Sinatra + ERB </body> </html> |
And change GET method to:
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' get '/' do erb :index end |
And the application now uses ERB templating.
Using HAML templates is simple, change to:
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml' get '/' do haml :index end |
And add "views/index.haml" as:
| %html %body %h1 Hello from HAML |
And now the application is using HAML templates.
__END__ is the end of Ruby, can be anything after that and it'll not barf. Sinatra uses it for in file templates:
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml' get '/' do erb :index end use_in_file_templates! __END__ @@ index <html> <body> Hello form Sinatra + ERB in file </body> </html> |
Start with in-file templates, and then move out to separate directory ("views") once grows big. But no syntax highlighting etc.
Add your custom template as:
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml' get '/' do erb :index end get '/foo' do erb :foo end use_in_file_templates! __END__ @@ index <html> <body> Hello form Sinatra + ERB in file </body> </html> @@ foo <h1>FOO!</h1> |
With this file "http://localhost:4567/" uses ERB template, and "http://localhost:4567/foo" uses "foo" template.
Sinatra defines on Main. The before filters work before every single request, executed in the same context as lambda. Can be used if every request needs to do some setup.
Helpers can be defined as:
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml' helpers do end |
without defining on Main. Or ...
| require
'rubygems' require 'sinatra' require 'haml' module helpers def self.dosomething(arg) end end get '/' do Helpers.dosomething end |
Don't define something on Main, it's a bad practice.
Extension is a nice package that can be shared for other Sinatra developers to use, like Rails plugins but does not have boilerplate, much easier to do.
Rest of tutorial was quite fast paced so the code samples could not be captured. But there is boatload of information available at sinatrarb.com.
Check out the pictures from Day 1:
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The evening concluded with dinner at Burger Bar at Mandalay Bay along with Project Kenai team.
And check the evolving album at:
Running at Rails Conf, Las Vegas 2009
Six of us from @railsConfRunner
ran together around Las
Vegas Hilton this morning.
6.4 miles, 57:04 minutes.
Interested in running together ?
Join us at 6:15am in the Hilton lobby tomorrow morning! Here is a
picture of the running group from this morning:
Thanks to Jed (2nd from right) for organizing the run, and of course
all the running
buddies to make it a fun run :)
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Posted by Arun Gupta in Running | Comments[0]
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TOTD #81: How to configure "database.yml" to be used with both JRuby and MRI ?
In JRuby-on-Rails
tutorial at Rails
Conf 2009, Nick
Sieger shared a nice little tip on how to configure
"database.yml" to be usable with both JRuby and MRI:
| <% jdbc = defined?(JRUBY_VERSION) ? 'jdbc' : ''
%> development: adapter: <%= jdbc %>mysql encoding: utf8 reconnect: false database: myapp_development pool: 5 username: root password: socket: /tmp/mysql.sock # ... |
"JRUBY_VERSION" is defined only if your using JRuby and so the right database adapter is picked up accordingly.
The complete slides for the tutorial are available here. Learn about other related talks here.
Please leave suggestions on other TOTD (Tip Of The Day) that you'd like to see. An archive of all the tips is available here.
Technorati: conf railsconf lasvegas tutorial jruby ruby rubyonrails
Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[0]
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Monday April 27, 2009
GlassFish, NetBeans, and Project Kenai at Rails Conf 2009
Did you know that ...
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There are many other similar nuggets that I'll be covering in my Rails Conf 2009 session. Details are given below:
 |
Develop
with pleasure, Deploy with Fun: GlassFish and NetBeans for a better
Rails experience Tuesday, May 5th, 2009, 1:50pm Pavilion 1 |
Register Today and avail a 15% discount using the code: RC09FOS.
I plan to attend these sessions, lets see how many I can make :-) And of course, you'll see me in the Exhibit Hall.
| And you'll get to meet Project Kenai team, they form the foundation for Sun's connected developer experience. Read about their participation here and meet them to learn about NetBeans and Kenai integration. |  |
And if you are interested in running with fellow attendees, follow @railsConfRunner.
And it's Vegas baby!
JRuby and GlassFish is already used in production. Do you have a success story to share ? I'll be happy to promote at RailsConf.
Technorati: conf glassfish netbeans rubyonrails kenai railsconf lasvegas jruby
Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[5]
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
LOTD #9: Slides for Deploying and Monitoring Ruby on Rails Tutorial @ Rails Conf Europe 2008
During Rails
Conf Europe 2008
Day 1 I attended an excellent tutorial on Deploying
and Monitoring Ruby on Rails. The session very clearly
explained the several deployment options with Rails. My notes from the
session are here
and the slides are now available.
Here are couple of snapshots from the slide:
The complete set of slides from Rails Conf Europe 2008 are available here.
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rubyonrails
berlin
Posted by Arun Gupta in web2.0 | Comments[0]
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Friday September 05, 2008
Rails Conf Europe 2008 - Day 3
Last day of Rails Conf Europe 2008 (Day
1 & Day
2), and it's finally over!
David Black's opening session talked about Ruby
and Rails Symposium: Versions, Implementations, and the Future.
Here is a brief summary of MRI Ruby versions:
- Ruby 1.8.6
- Bread and butter for many of us
- 1.8.7
- 1.8 with lots of backported 1.9 features
- Help with migration to 1.9
- Not gaining traction, is it ?
- 1.9.0
- First release of 1.9
- Not particularly feature stable
- Not in wide production use.
- 1.9.1
- Feature freeze 9/25
- Release Christmas 2008 (planned)
- Expected to be more stable
- 4 - How many are using 1.8.7 ?
- 98% - How many are using 1.8.6 ?
- 1 - How many are using 1.9.0 ?
- 4 - Tried 1.8.7 and not switching
- 3 - Tried 1.9 and not switching
- 85% - Never tried 1.9
In Developing Ruby and Rails applications with the NetBeans IDE talk, Erno & Petr showed all the cool features of Ruby/Rails editing, syntax highlighting, debugging, project creation, refactoring and many more. You can find all about it here.
Rails powered by GlassFish talk was well attended. The slides are available here and if you attended the session, please rate it here. I value your feedback. Some of the excerpts from the talk are:
- GlassFish v3 Gem for development and deployment
- Auto-configure Runtime Pooling
- Rails deployment on GlassFish v3
- WAR-based deployment
- JDBC Connection Pooling
- Comet in Rails
- Popular Apps in Rails (Typo, Mephisto, Substuct, Redmine)
- JRuby/GlassFish Success Stories
- Hudson - Extensilbe CI Engine
- JRuby/GlassFish Endorsements
- FREE Rails/GlassFish hosting for 12 months
- Why Rails on GlassFish ?
Rails 2.0.4 and 2.1.1 were released during the conference. Now I need to start working on all the different blogs promised earlier this week :)
Here are some pictures from Day 3:
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And finally the complete photo album:
Thursday September 04, 2008
Rails Conf Europe 2008 - Day 2
Rails
Conf Europe 2008 Day 1 was mostly about tutorials.
On Day 2, David Black gave the opening session. After some logistics he
introduced the favorite
son of Chicago - David Heinemeier Hansson. The theme of
DHH's session was "Legacy Software". Now that Rails is 5 years old, the
discussions of legacy is indeed meaningful. He showed some code from BaseCamp
and showed how refactoring can deal with legacy. I love his statement
"What you write today will become legacy". That is indeed so true
especially given the fact that Rails community is now thinking about
legacy. There is Rails 1.2.x, 2.0.x, 2.1 and 2.2 coming up - it was
bound to happen. Overall a great session and love the honesty!
In JRuby:
The Other Red Meat by Tom Enebo, the highlights were:
- JRuby is "It's just Ruby". No prior knowledge of Java is required, at all, to run JRuby.
- 22,000 tests and 33,000 assertions (from Ruby Spec) all pass to ensure 1.8.6 compliance.
- 75% memory improvement with upcoming Rails 2.2. The numbers
captured from the preso for 1000 requests and 10 concurrent users are:
10 Rails instances Edge Rails Startup Memory 200 Mb 50 Mb Heap (at end) 233 Mb 55 Mb
I'll explain in a detailed post later on how to generate these numbers - Several JRuby success stories
- FFI support in JRuby that will make converting a C-based plugin to pure-Ruby a breeze
- rake stats: Provides Code to Test Ratio (0.8 to 1.6 is a good range)
- flog: Tracking code complexity (available as gem, useful for refactoring, elaborates on complexity)
- rcov: Tracking test coverage (analyzes line coverage, available as gem)
- heckle: Analyzes branch coverage (available as gem, dynamically mutates your code - flipping a branch should cause test failire, takes very long, not feasible for TDD)
- saikuro: Cyclometic complexity (Decidedly scientific graph theory, available as gem, highlights overly complex methods, useful to spot refactoring methods)
- metrics_fu: Set of Rake
tasks to use with CruiseControl, Runs all of the before mentioned on a
check-in. Anybody interested in integrating that with Hudson ?
Fernando explained in details in his session, Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails, on how to tune GlassFish for Rails applications. Look for his slides, they got real meat from a Rails application running on production with multiple concurrent requests.
At Five Runs exhibit, I found about FiveRuns monitoring on JRuby. That means you can generate all the performance monitoring data on GlassFish. And then there is nagios and stickshift for monitoring. That's a few blog posts for me later :)
Here are some of the sessions I plan to attend Day 2:
- Announcements (9:00)
- Ruby and Rails Symposium: Versions, Implementations, and the Future (9:15)
- Developing Ruby and Rails applications with the NetBeans IDE (10:45)
- Rails powered by GlassFish (13:40)
- How Not to Build a Service (15:45)
Here are some pictures from Day 2:
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And you can see the gourmet lunch was not only beautifully decorated, it was equally luscious:
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And finally the complete photo album so far:
Had a great 45 minutes run by Spree
Westward in
downtown Berlin. Thanks Thomas for the recommendation!
It's very clean with underpasses for most of the streets. And even the
2 streets I had to cross were narrow with little traffic @ 7am :)
Technorati: conf
railsconf
running
spree berlin
Posted by Arun Gupta in Running | Comments[0]
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Wednesday September 03, 2008
Rails Conf Europe 2008 - End of Tutorial Day
Sep
2, 2008 was the Tutorials Day @ Rails Conf Europe.
I attended Renegade's
Guide to Hacking Rails Internals (partly) and Deploying
and Monitoring Ruby on Rails. The first session did exactly
what it says - explained the complete internals, digging deep into the
code and how to hack them to
meet your needs. I thoroughly enjoyed the second tutorial as it covered
the deployment in detail and somewhat monitoring.
The first part covered the common Application Server and Web/Proxy
Servers used for Rails deployment. It explained the different
deployment scenarios and their pros/cons. The Application Servers
(along with their detailed notes) are:
- FastCGI
- Use mod_fcgi
- Proxy local and remove FastCGI instances
- Oldest way of deploying Rails
- Deprecated & Unstable (security problems in impl of Apache2, easy to get zombie processes, works for some)
- Hard to debug
- Dont' use in production
- Mongrel
- As an alternative to FastCGI
- Complete HTTP-server that can load arbitrary Ruby-servlets
- Built-in Rails support
- Utility to manage several Mongrel clusters (mongrel_cluster)
- Very robust, strict HTTP parser, easy to debug
- Defacto standard deployment with Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy_balancer
- Can be a bit difficult to setup
- Not so easy on mass/virtual hosting
- mod_rails (aka Phusion Passenger)
- Similar to mod_php
- Fairly new module of Apache 2.2
- Allows Apache to control Rails instances
- Apache starts/stop app instance depending on the app load
- Very easy to setup
- Able to run any RACK-compatible Ruby app
- Pros
- Touching a file "restart.txt" and Phusion automatically restarts all the Rails instances
- All Rails instances are local to a machine
- HTTP balancer is required to spawn across multiple machines
- Fairly new but ready for production
- Makes setup easier - on single machine
- Multiple server still require load balancer
- Suitable for mass hosting
- JRuby, GlassFish & Co
- Similar to mod_rails where multiple runtimes can run on a single machine
- WAR-based deployments
- Suitable for Java shops
- Database connection pooling
Here are the requirements on Proxy servers:
- Hide cluster backend from the user
- Load-balancer backend instances
- Recognize down hosts
- Fair scheduler
- Apache2
- Introduced mod_proxy_balancer
- Can speak to multiple backends and balance requests
- Can act as pure proxy or can also serve static files
- Deliver static content
- Pros
- Very old, mature, stable
- Many people know how to work with Apache
- Integrates well with other modules (SVN, DAV, etc)
- Cons
- Can be complicated to configure
- The stock Apache is quite resource-hungry (12-15 KB, where nginx takes 3-5 KB and 20% faster serving of static files) compared to pure proxy solutions
- nginx
- Popular Russian web server with good proxy support (40% websites in Russia run nginx)
- Can load-balance multiple backends and deliver static content
- Quite popular with Mongrel as Rails backend
- Simple configuration file - http://brainspl.at/nginx.conf.txt (nginx conf file)
- Pros
- Stable, Robust, Fast
- Use fewer resources (CPU & RAM) than Apache proxy-mode & static files
- Simple configuration file
- Can directly talk to memcached - SSI
- Cons
- More documentation would be nice
- No equivalent for many Apache modules
- LightTPD
- Lightweight and Fast web server
- Balancing proxy server
- Good FastCGI support
- Used to be popular - until Mongrel came around
- Nobody is using these days in production
- Pros
- Fast & lightweight
- User fewer resources
- Simpler configuration file
- Cons
- Unstable for some people
- Slow development cycle
- More docs would be nice
- HA-Proxy (also applies to Pen and Pound)
- Reliable, High performance TCP/HTTP-level balancer (SNMP or MySQL proxying too)
- Proxying and content inspection
- No content serving, just a proxy
- Pros
- Mature, stable & fast
- TCP & HTTP Balancing
- Cons
- Few Rails examples
- Usually not needed in Rails setup
- Small site - Apache 2.2 with mod_rails
- Medium site - Apache 2.2 as front-end proxy + Mongrel or mod_rails as backend, Deliver static files with Apache.Not nginx because it does not depend on the extra power to deliver static files.
- Large Rails site - Redundant load-balancer, redundant proxy/web, Mongrel/mod_rails
- Heavy static files - Dynamic requests to Apache+mod_rails, static files nginx/lighttpd
- Java Shop - WAR fles + integrate with existing Java landscape and infrastructure
The tutorial concluded by discussing monitoring. The two criteria for monitoring are:
- Is it still running ?
- What are the trends ?
- Monit
- Process-level monitoring
- Checks PID-files, ports and perms
- Reacts by executing a script and/or alerting
- Munin
- Host level monitoring tool
- Master periodically ask nodes for local data
- Check system resources and records historical data
- Allows to recognize trends and make predictions
- Alerting support
The evening concluded with Q&A from Rails Core Members - DHH, Koz & Jeremy.
Here are some of the sessions I plan to attend tomorrow:
- Welcome (9:00)
- Morning Keynote (9:15)
- JRuby: The Other Red Meat (10:45)
- Rails Software Metrics (11:35)
- Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails (13:40)
- Rubinius 1.0 (14:30)
- Security on Rails (15:20)
Here are some pictures from yesterday:
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And finally the complete photo album so far:
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
