Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development
My interview with Michael Hartl of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial series is now live on InfoQ. Michael is such an interesting guy and has a diverse background ranging from physics instructor at CalTech to Ruby on Rails teacher.
Please give Learning Ruby on Rails with Michael Hartl a read.
You can find out more information about the printed version of Michael’s book Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
I have had the opportunity recently to discuss Goliath, a new Ruby application server from PostRank Labs, with its creator Ilya Grigorik. The article and interview titled, Meet the Goliath of Ruby Application Servers, is now up on the InfoQ web site, please give it a read. I think it is a unique and very useful project worth giving a look.
I was fortunate enough to have a look at the project before it was released and was able to work with it. I have to say that I am really excited about this project to solve some problems in my own work. I had previously thought of using node.js but was turned off by the thought of having to write some server-side JavaScript.
Goliath uses Ruby 1.9+ to take advantage of fibers (continuations). This is one example why developers should be moving to Ruby 1.9.2 and beyond. Hopefully we see more projects like Goliath that take advantage of 1.9’s features and prod developers to a better Ruby.
Today the great team led by Wayne Sequin (rvm fame) and Luis Lavena (RubyInstaller fame) and initiated by Dr. Nic Williams of Engine Yard released RailsInstaller.
RailsInstaller is really what Instant Rails brought to Windows developers wanting to write Ruby and Ruby on Rails code, but now evolved. RailsInstaller takes Ruby and Rails to their current versions and add some other niceties to give the Windows developer the ability to create real Rails applications today. Included is:
I would expect that we would see a Ruby 1.9.2 at some point but imagine there must be some technical hurdles to get beyond before it makes sense to release.
Installation is a breeze by just following the simple installation wizard all Windows users know all about. A nice video has been created to show how to install and get started:
The video is very clear and the installation wizard really simple, just follow the directions and keep the defaults for the best experience.
The installer explains clearly what is being installed in this particular version.
The default is to add to the PATH statement. I would recommend keeping this so your system knows where to find all the needed executables.
You should notice a nice shortcut to a Ruby and Rails prompt all setup to use.
The Ruby version as well as the Git version are cleanly shown. You are good to go.
I was lucky enough to have a prerelease build of the tool and even in a prerelease state, they guys did a great job. It was easy to create Rails apps and have them running in no time. Keep in mind that not all Ruby gems will yet be compatible with Windows. If you encounter issues you are best advised to contact the person in charge of the gem project you are trying to install.
I encourage everyone to who is interested in Rails on Windows in a clean package to download the installer now and give it a go.
It has been a long time since InstantRails has been brought up-to-date and I had been wondering if the community had any continued interest in the project.
Well, recently I had been contacted about the project and moving it forward and bring it to Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2.
Today Instant Rails 2.0 consists of fairly old Ruby on Rails components:
The goal of the next version of Instant Rails would be something really easy to install and use. One of the great features of Instant Rails today is the ability to extract the Instant Rails zip file to any directory you choose and have the ability to delete it later without the fancy uninstall ceremony we usually see in Windows.
I wrote here in the past about setting up to run Ruby on Rails 3 on Windows. The steps are not complicated but may be more than new developers are able to follow.
My initial thoughts of components to be included:
In the spirit of keeping these simple; what am I missing? What components are missing?
Let’s not talk features just yet but major components only. I am leaving out Apache and MySQL as I don’t think they’re needed. WebBrick and SQLite3 work just fine for development purposes.
Please provide your thoughts in the comments as to the interest in a new version of Instant Rails and also what components are needed.
Thank you.
The Ruby Rails consulting shop Makandra recently opened their internal knowledge base of how-tos and code snippets for all to see and use. The announcement about the project indicates 500+ links:
This September we decided to take our in-house knowledge base and publish it for everyone to see. makandra notes contains some 200 HOWTOs and 500+ links for Ruby, Rails, RSpec, Cucumber and Javascript and is growing every day.
Whether you’re looking to deliver Paperclip attachments securely, test concurrent Ruby code or marry Capybara with SSL-enabled applications, chances are we already solved your problem for you.
The reality is as of this writing, 718 notes are listed. It’s a good resource and one I hope they add to and either let others contribute to or open source the application for others to use to build internal/external knowledge bases.
The search is fast too and real-time, narrowing down results as I typed.
Besides having some useful information you can also see the user interface is nice and clean. The resource is from a Rails shop but it is not just for Rails issues but rather the issues Rails developers deal with each day, from Ruby, Rails and JavaScript to Ubuntu server administration and cron jobs.
Way to go Makandra and thanks for the resource.
I recently found I problem I needed to solve; remove hundreds of thousands of files from Amazon S3. I mean, it had to be a common problem, right? Well, it certainly be a common problem but the solution was less than common.
I tried a few tools available, both the tool from the Amazon S3 site but it keep erroring out and I was never sure why. I then went to third-party tools used for managing S3 buckets but their either errored-out or behaved as if they worked but later determined did nothing.
I posted my need on Twitter and was pointed to a solution (thanks @Kishfy) I had not thought of, use Ruby. There is a great open-source project named S3Nukem which its sole purpose is to remove Amazon S3 buckets.
This is an open source project hosted on Github. Installation and setup is pretty simple (from the Github repo readme), install required gems.
sudo gem install dmarkow-right_aws --source http://gems.github.com
The docs don’t mention it but I needed to install the right_http_connection gem, the above command fails unless it is installed.
sudo gem install right_aws
curl -O http://github.com/lathanh/s3nukem/raw/master/s3nukem
chmod 755 s3nukem
This is done in the directory where the above curl command was executed from.
Usage: ./s3nukem [options] buckets...
Options:
-a, --access ACCESS Amazon Access Key (required)
-s, --secret SECRET Amazon Secret Key (required)
-t, --threads COUNT Number of simultaneous threads (default 10)
-h, --help Show this message
Running the application in a terminal window shows large numbers of files being deleted:
This script is fast. I tried running this under both Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 with 1.9.2 quite a bit faster. I didn’t run any benchmarks but it was noticeably faster, my goal was really to just delete large amounts of files. Ruby 1.9.2 thread handling really shines here and with the ability to control the number threads from the command line, is really nice.
The nice thing about this script version is the cap on the number of items to be deleted each time, 1000 * thread_count, which defaults to 10. With this limit in place the script won’t chew up all your system memory.
This script is designed to delete an entire bucket but could be modified to just remove the content or a directory tree within the bucket. I may do this for a project I am working which has a need for such functionality.
Well, the long-awaited release of Ruby on Rails 3 is now out and all of the Mac and Linux junkies are busy gem-installing the latest version of the framework. What about all the lonely Windows developers out there looking through their windows (pun intended) and wondering what it’s like on the other side of the fence?
Good news! It is actually pretty easy to setup and run Rails 3 on your Windows system. I mainly run on Macs these days but have a couple Windows systems still kicking around and thought I would give a go. It is actually pretty straight-forward now and works really well. Follow the steps:
Rails 3 requires at least Ruby 1.8.7 and is happy using Ruby 1.9.2, I opted for the latest and greatest.
Running the Ruby version command from a new command prompt:
ruby -v
If you get a file-not-found or some other undesirable result then the path setting isn’t likely correct or you may want to try closing the command prompt and opening a new one.
This is a tough one:
gem install rails
UPDATE: A reader points out of issues with installing Rails as pointed out by a post on the Ruby Forum. The issue was solved by simply adding a –pre to the gem command to install Rails.
gem install rails --pre
Everything you need to run Rails 3 gets installed with the exception of the SQLite3 Ruby gem which Rails uses as the default database provider:
gem install sqlite3-ruby
You should see a message similar to this:
I use SQLite3 for most of my local development unless I need a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Installing is trivial.
If you look at the above message when installing the sqlite3-ruby you should notice the gem relies on the sqlite3.dll and it is recommended to use version 3.6.23.1, which you can download form here. I grabbed 3.7.2 and it seems to work fine, your mileage may vary. If you’re interested, get the latest from the SQLite3 downloads page.
Now with the sqlite3.dll in hand (unzipped from the download), copy to the bin directory of the above Ruby installation. In my case that’s C:\Ruby192\bin, and that’s it.
Now it’s time to test the new Ruby and Rails installation. Pick a location to create the new application and run the new Rails command from a command prompt:
rails new testapp
This command creates a new directory called testapp and spits out a bunch of text along the way, looking something like this:
Once done, change directory into the new testapp directory and run:
rake db:migrate
This will test your SQLite3 installation and create a new development database in the testapp\db directory called development.sqlite3. If you get any errors it is likely the sqlite3.dll is not in your Ruby bin directory, check and come back.
Now from the testapp directory, fire up the Rails development server from a command prompt:
rails server
WebBrick fires up and looks like this:
If there are errors reported than something has gone wrong. If you see this screen, fire up your browser and browser to the address http://localhost:3000. If all goes well, you will see this screen:
Click on the link below the title that reads “About your application’s environment”. This gives a lot of detail about your Rails application configuration.
Congratulations! You have the latest and greatest Ruby and Ruby on Rails running on the Windows platform.
Now go out and read Mike Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial for Rail 3 and create some applications.
My appetite for podcasts is always growing but my interests routinely change. I don’t listen to many .NET-specific podcasts any longer, but more along the lines of software craftsmanship, Mac/iPhone, Python and Ruby development. I hike about an hour a day to try to stay somewhat fit and always have my iPhone loaded up with podcasts to pass the time.
I am always searching for new podcasts and from time-to-time that I come across new ones I consider worth sharing. It has been a while since I have shared any, so now seems like as good a time as any. My last update from a few years ago titled Software Development Podcast List has seen a few additions.
Even though I don’t put screencasts on my iPhone, I do watch these in my free time on my Mac. These are really good, so I wanted to share. I didn’t really have enough to put in their own categories, so everything is just lumped together.
I am always looking for any other podcasts or screencasts covering unique topics. Please leave a comment here with some I may not be including here and may enjoy. Thank you.
RailsConf 2010 was this past week in Baltimore, MD. I decided to make the trip down from CT since it was only about 5 hours by train. Many people have already covered the conference around the interwebs and I am not doing it here.
I had a great time, meeting many new friends and catching up with some old ones. I arrived on Sunday evening and attended the Ignite RailsConf event. This event had excellent content and was well attended with about 200 people coming out.
Monday came and we had a full schedule of 3-hour tutorial sessions. These were good but the unfortunate thing about multi-track events is missing some sessions I would like to see. It appears the keynotes were the only sessions being recorded, which is too bad.
The keynotes were really one of the highlights of the event for me. I get the most out of these as they are typically by members of the software development community which are not necessarily Ruby or Rails related. The exception here was really Gary Vaynerchuck, which I missed because I was traveling home. Thankfully, O’Reilly was recording these sessions and I can watch when I have the time.
Anyone who did not attend RailsConf should check out the recorded keynote sessions from DHH, Yehuda Katz, Derek Sivers, Robert Martin, Gary Vaynerchuck, Michael Feather, Neal Ford and Evan Phoenix.
The sessions were overall pretty good and I enjoyed the ones I attended, but I wish I could see other sessions than just the ones I attended. I think we should petition O’Reilly to record all talks.
Attending all these sessions during the week were really exhausting. As I write this on Saturday I still feel tired and imagine I won’t feel rested for a few days.
I have come to learn that the real value of any conference is not the knowledge acquired while attending the sessions but the friends and acquaintances we see and the new relationships formed.
I met many people who I knew only from the online world, interacting on my blog or Twitter. I was fun to see how the people looked different than their Twitter pictures, many look very different.
I did have a good time at RailsConf but it was exhausting. As I write this today I am still really tired from the 5 days I was away.
I find it interesting how people take in a conference, how they spend their time. As I attended talks I looked around the room to see a sea of Apple logos of the MacBooks in the audience. I noticed people with their MacBooks spending the session writing code, surfing the web or using Twittering. I repeatedly wondered why people make the effort to attend a session yet do something other than pay attention to the speaker.
I have been to both large and small conferences and especially after this RailsConf, I keep think that smaller single track conferences are the way to go if you want the chance to have a richer environment. I missed several people I wanted to meet but never ran into them, which goes to show the size of the group. Smaller conferences typically have 100-200 people and gives attendees a better chance of seeing everyone.
I am looking forward to attending more computer science and engineering related conferences this year as well as some business-specific ones such as BizConf. I think these are the types of conferences I will gain more value from, rather than simply Ruby-specific. I hope to see you at a conference soon.
The release of the web framework, Ruby on Rails 3, may lead to some pretty interesting decisions for current Rails developers.
The description of Rails 3 from the Agile Web Development with Rails 4th Edition (beta) book from the Pragmatic Programmers web site sums it up pretty well:
Rails 3 is a major release—the changes aren’t just incremental, but structural. So we decided to follow suit. This book isn’t just a mild reworking of the previous edition to make it run with the new Rails. Instead, it’s a complete refactoring.
Rails 3 introduces many new things, many new conventions. Version 3 looks more like a new framework, rather than just a version upgrade. Previously, the amount of effort to move from one Rails version to another was pretty small and unit tests helped reveal problems. We still rely on our unit tests for this purpose but the effort is not as small.
Rails 3 does offer many fantastic new features and the new architecture attempts to fix problems and areas where the current Rails framework falls short, but at what cost? I have heard people say over and over, moving to Rails 3 is difficult. Will this prevent migrating projects to Rails 3?
Jeremy McAnally has written a great ebook titled Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook where he outlines the tasks developers will face when moving existing Rails applications from version 3. To quote Jeremy from the book about moving applications to Rails 3:
The new features, performance improvements, and API changes aren’t incredibly drastic, but they do present great opportunities (and challenges) to those looking to upgrade existing code to the newest version.
Jeremy also has a plugin that became an official Rails plugin that helps guide the developer through the upgrade process.
I know with certainty there are Rails developers concerned up moving existing code to a new Rails, new conventions. One of Rails strengths are the convention it employs and as developers we learn the intricacies of our framework the hard way. Rails 3 will require an education to learn the new conventions.
Could this be a point in time where faithful Rails developers move on to a different framework? I doubt devotees won’t, but maybe some.
Case in point, Microsoft Active Server Pages.
I have witnessed and been involved with this before when Microsoft created a web framework named Active Server Pages, referred to ASP. After a much successful growth of ASP developers, Microsoft decided to create ASP.NET which is their current web framework based on webforms.
The problem was that even though the product names were very similar, the truth was they were drastically different. Developers were faced with:
Developers were faced with making the jump to ASP.NET or deciding to move on to something else, leaving behind the gripes of Microsoft. Some moved to PHP, as it resembled ASP more than ASP.NET. Some moved to legacy ASP project to Rails, the views looked more like ASP than ASP.NET
Up until this point, Rails has been a pretty smooth transition from version to version, even when applications were running older versions of Rails such as 1.2.x and moving to 2.x was pretty straightforward. I moved many Rails 1.2.6 applications to 2.x and faced little major issues, certainly not a rewrite.
This is not the case when moving to Rails 3, there is no smooth upgrade path and users will be forced to rewrite significant parts of their applications.
The architecture of Rails has changed in a big way, mostly by Yehuda Katz of Merb fame. Rails 3 takes the good from Merb in many ways, as I would expect. The view from 50,000’, Rails 3 does not closely resemble Rails 2.x as we know it today.
As was the case with Classic ASP, I think developers either bit the bullet and rewrote their applications with pain and learning, stayed put and are still there today or moved to a different web framework, maybe Rails, maybe PHP.
I think we are at this point with Ruby on Rails. Developers are faced with the task of moving to Rails 3 and making that technical leap, not to a new programming language as with ASP.NET, but a new framework. Rails 3 is different enough from any previous version that moving existing application will not be a rewrite but a change enough to be a considerable effort. Rails developers are well versed in how the framework functions, Rails 3 is very different.
This may be an opportunity for other frameworks to gain some traction. New developers considering Ruby on Rails 3 have a bigger challenge with the framework, it is not exactly the framework DHH developed only a few years ago.
Other frameworks worth considering:
I could be wrong here but I think the advantage Rails had with an easy-to-learn framework, great productivity and easy upgrades will be a bit strained in Rails 3.
This will surely be a great opportunity for developers well-versed in Rails 3 to start or expand consulting career helping companies with existing Rails code bases upgrading to Rails 3. I think these folks will be in high demand.
So what will happen? I don’t know. Rails is a great framework but converting a large code base is going to be a challenge and Rails 3 is the future, not the 2.3.x code base.
I know I have asked more questions than I have answered. I hope the powers that be in the Rails leadership understand the concern.
UPDATE: As comments have pointed out, if this sounds Rails-negative, it is not meant to be. I see this a call for people with knowledge of Rails 3, bits of experience with upgrading projects of any size to share the knowledge. Blog about what you did, even the most mundane details and share what you know so jump ship DOES NOT happen.