Ruby on Rails – Page 2

Active Resource not in Rails 1.2!

Whilst planning some changes to my News Sniffer project, I thought I’d have a play with Active Resource.

Currently, all the forum and news article downloading and scraping happens on a different machine to the web server. It has a VPN connection to the database and memcache servers, but I’d like to integrate the Ferret text indexing system for better searching capabilities. To centralise Ferret, I have a three options:

regularly reindex new content from the database on the web server;
DRb a Ferret Object;
or use ActiveResource to access the models via the web service.

DRb-ing a Ferret Object would be quite elegant, but using ActiveResource would also replace the need for a database and memcache connection (and I could do much better fragment caching actually).

Anyway, I searched high and low for some docs – lots of blog entries about how great it is, but no real api docs. When I searched through the Rails code and found nothing either, I got suspicious. Finally I found a couple of blog entries stating that ActiveResource was dropped from Rails 1.2. It seems to be planned for Rails 2.0. Not sure how I missed this. I guess my search-foo is lacking.

I’ll be investigating other options. I’d much prefer not to build a SOAP or XMLRPC interface. Ugh.

5/2/2007 1 Comment

Bruce Schneier whistles white noise

The new ELER strip is about Bruce Schneier and links to a Chuck Norris style Bruce Schneier Facts Database system I wrote. It got linked from Boingboing, Metafilter, Reddit and even Bruce Schneier’s own blog!

As you might imagine, it’s getting trabigillions of hits right now. Lucky I wrote it in Ruby on Rails with its built in page caching which (after first render) serves as fast as the webserver can serve. And since I’m using Lighttpd too, that is very fast.

17/8/2006 Add Comment

Can I Compost This?

Louisa and I am announcing our latest project: Compost This. It’s a directory of items with information about it’s compostability.

For example Tea and Flour can be put on the compost heap, but Bindweed and Walnuts cannot. And it’s not always a good idea to put Orange peel on there either.

For geeks: I wrote Compost This using Ruby on Rails, which is one of the best web frameworks I’ve used, and I’m really starting to love the Ruby language too. I’ll release the code soon as an example.

14/8/2006 2 Comments

Lighttpd and Ruby on Rails: Secure and Fast Downloading

When controlling access to files on a webserver developers often use the web application itself as a file server. The request comes in, the script checks for some session authentication variable or something, then streams the file from disk (hopefully from outside the webroot) to the browser.

The problem with this from a performance standpoint is that a thread/process of the web application has to be running for the entire duration of the download. With a busy webserver serving many concurrent downloads, this is an immense overhead. The web server itself should be orders of magnitude faster at serving files directly than via a web application, but you can’t just stick the files in a different directory and hope nobody finds the secret urls. The new web server on the block, Lighttpd, has some clever solutions for this problem.
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16/3/2006 3 Comments

I changed his life through webdev

A couple of months ago I was having an IM conversation with an old web developer work friend and asked him if he’d played with Ruby on Rails yet. He told me not and I enquired as to whether he’d been living in a mud hut within a rain forest for the last year. He told me not. I pointed him in the right direction and he said he’d take a look sometime.

Today, after no further conversion, I got this message from him:

(16:14:48) Sid: Hey John!! Just wanted to say thanks for introducing me to Ruby on Rails.. I’ve picked up on it and its changed my life. Now I’m working a contract for the government and dating a hot american chick from new york. btw – like the photo. its class.
(16:16:16) Sid logged out.

He used to be a Coldfusion developer. After finding Ruby on Rails he must look back on Coldfusion and laugh up hard matter from his lower intestine.

Anybody else want to comment on how I’ve changed their life? If you only met me once and had to spend the rest of your life avoiding me it still counts.

19/2/2006 4 Comments