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Planet Ruby

Planet Ruby - http://planetruby.0x42.net/


Ruby on Rails: This Week in Edge RailsToday

January 3, 2009 -January 9, 2009

It was a pretty light week for the edge Rails tree: about 20 commits. We’re starting to see things coalesce for a 2.3 release, though there’s no official release date yet. Here’s some of the highlights of what’s been going on.

AssetTag Timestamp Caching

You’re likely familiar with Rails’ practice of adding timestamps to static asset paths as a “cache buster.” This helps ensure that stale copies of things like images and stylesheets don’t get served out of the user’s browser cache when you change them on the server. You can now modify this behavior with the cache_asset_timestamps configuration option for Action View. If you enable the cache, then Rails will calculate the timestamp once when it first serves an asset, and save that value. This means fewer (expensive) file system calls to serve static assets – but it also means that you can’t modify any of the assets while the server is running and expect the changes to get picked up by clients. commit

Object#tap Backport

Object#tap is an addition to Ruby 1.9 and 1.8.7 that is similar to the returning method that Rails has had for a while: it yields to a block, and then returns the object that was yielded. Rails now includes code to make this available to
Pat Eyler: Editor Interview: Talking about Open Content with O'Reilly's Mike LoukidesYesterday
With a recent string of interviews with authors working on (open) books for O'Reilly, I wanted to see what the folks inside O'Reilly had to say about this trend. Mike Loukides (@mikeloukides) was good enough to answer my questions in a short interview. There's some great stuff in here whether you're an aspiring author, interested in open content, or how thinking conversations (in the web 2.0
Mauricio Fernandez: Standalone web applications using OCaml + Ocsigen, benchmarked against RailsJanuary 7

I finally bit the bullet and rewrote eigenclass using the Ocsigen web server + framework for OCaml. It is simpler, faster, more reliable, and easier to extend than the customized wiki implementation in Ruby (Hiki) I'd been using. It is also easier to deploy because it's self-contained: a single (native code) executable contains both the Ocsigen web server and the application code, so I don't have to use any special Apache modules, FastCGI or any sort of adapter. (The ability to create standalone, native-code executables was added recently to Ocsigen and is thus available on the devel branch, soon to be released as Ocsigen 1.2.)

I'd read somewhere that the Ocsigen server hadn't received much (any?) optimization work, so I benchmarked it against Lighttpd, Apache and mongrel, both at static file serving and dynamic contents (a minimal "hello world" service), to see if that could represent a problem. It turns out it isn't: the OCaml+Ocsigen combo is very fast. It serves minimal dynamic requests an order of magnitude faster than Rails with a pack of mongrels behind nginx, and uses 40 times less memory. More surprisingly, it handles more requests per core than lighttpd with a minimal FastCGI server written in C! (lighttpd wasn't able to handle ab's load with max_procs = 1, and generated way too many 5xx errors, so I had to use several FastCGI processes). It also serves static files at rates exceed

Ruby on Rails: Announcing the Rails activistsJanuary 5

Railway station crowd

Bringing Rails and Merb together is about more than just merging the respective code. We’re also picking up the best ideas from both communities beyond the code. Following on Merb’s success in offering a strong evangelism effort, we’re pleased to announce the creation of the Rails activists:

The mission of the Rails activists is to empower and support the worldwide network of Ruby on Rails users. We do this by publicizing Rails, making adoption easier, and enhancing developer support.

At launch, we’ve identified seven areas where the Rails activists can contribute to the Rails ecosystem:

  • Public Relations with media of all sizes
  • Ombudsman work to ensure good user-to-user support
  • Community Leadership at events and conferences
  • Media Organization to help create good promotional opportunities
  • Website maintenance
  • Documentation efforts
  • Developer support

The initial members of the Rails activists are Gregg Pollack, Matt Aimonetti, Ryan Bates, and Mike Gunderloy. But we can’t do all this alone, nor do we want to! Our v

Pat Eyler: New Year's Road TripJanuary 4
In December, we heard that the Sahpeech chapter was going to hold a Fellowship with a Brotherhood ceremony in Gunnison on January 2-3. Since we had an Ordeal candidate and a Brotherhood candidate just waiting for the opportunity, we decided to take a road trip. On Friday afternoon, we packed up our gear (and lots of warm clothes) and dinner to eat on the road, and we headed off. The youth