Dan J Bernstein’s (djb) daemontools is a set of programs to help you manage unix services. It provides a flexible, secure and convenient way of starting, stopping and sending signals to background processes. Combined with his ucspi-tcp tools, it can be used as an awesome replacement to inetd (it’s most often used in this way to run qmail, a secure and high-performance mta). It can be fiddly to set up and has a bit of a steep learning curve but I already use daemontools for various other stuff, so it was just natural for me to use it for Ruby on Rails deployment.
Tag: rails
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.
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.
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.