Rails 1.1: RJS, Active Record++, respond_to, integration tests, and 500 other things!

The biggest upgrade in Rails history has finally arrived. Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.

Update 29-Mar-2006: if there is a problems with your typo blog: bind it to rails 1.0

Everything started with a post, benchmarking cherrypy agains other similar web servers . Nothing special, we can see how good Mongrel is ;) What catched my attention was the lines about LuaWeb2:

[Mongrel]
...
Requests per second:    386.31 [#/sec] (mean)

[LuaWeb]
...
Requests per second:    927.04 [#/sec] (mean)

What the hack… In general I like Lua , because of the small size, easy to extend and embed, easy to learn. I made several simple application before, but never gone too deep in my Lua experiments. So what I found now was pretty amazing and surprized me. For me Lua seems pretty much ready for web 2.0 applications development :

• LuaForge—community portal, very active – a lot of interesting applications
• Kepler—Web development platform, runs under Windows, Linux, OSX and a number of other operating systems, allows the use of SQL, LDAP, XML, SOAP and other standards! LuaFilesystem, LuaSQL, LuaLDAP, CGILua…And see this: LuaJava—allow scripts written in Lua to manipulate components developed in Java, LuaJava also allows Java to implement an interface using Lua! Whaaaau…
• CGILua currently supports CGI, FastCGI, mod_lua (for Apache), ISAPI (for Microsoft IIS), Servlets (for Tomcat), LunaticPython (for Zope) , Xavante (a Lua Web server that supports CGILua natively) as Launchers
• Xavante—Lua HTTP 1.1 Web server that uses a modular architecture based on handlers

A little more googling give me also this:

• SVN Repository with Lua resources

-- from DB/TestModel.lua
DBModel:load( function() 
        Is( Book ) 
        Has( title ) 
        Has( price ) 
        HasOne( publisher ) 
        HasMany( authors ) 
end )

Looks familiar a ;)

It’s just a question of time somebody to combine this with some of the so many existing Ajax frameworks.

Must read articles for everybody, doing RoR systems administration:

• The adventures of scaling, Stage 1
• Questions and answers for Stage 1
• The adventures of scaling, Stage 2
• The adventures of scaling, Stage 3

03-Apr-2006 Update:

• The adventures of scaling, Stage 4

The new player on the Web 2.0 scene? Ajax improved the UI, Comet seems more server-side oriented. Via a persistent HTTP connections it making the communication with the server “push-based” – the server, asynchroniously pushing data to the client side, based on some events. Better than Ajax for community-driven applications.

Bad according to some ppl, it can be just an Ajax pattern – HTTP Streaming . Still pretty long and informative discussion on Digg .

We are using Xen 3.0.1 on Debian Sarge from several months. Working great. Finally there is an upgraded manual on HowtoForge – The Perfect Xen 3.0 Setup For Debian . Good. Also something else bring my attention: Setting Up A Highly Available NFS Server . We need this for live migrations – Xen need to get the OS filesystem image from the NFS, but it becoming a single point of failure. Anoter solution can be MogileFS – open source distributed filesystem.

Like a long time shot Parallax (cluster storage system under development by the Xen team with COW and snapshot features) seems pretty atractive.

Update 28-03-2006: the last missing part from the setup was reliable database backend, found: Load-Balanced MySQL Cluster

I translated Gorou-san’s page for following Edge Rails (original is in japanese) – link to the edgerails page in english . For me the described method seems like a pretty smart way to stay organized, even on the cutting edge.

FastCGI is difficult to install/manage. Really it is :(

Problem: DHH loves FastCGI. There is so many FastCGI-centric stuff in Rails:

• script/process/ scripts
• the default lighttpd.conf, generated by script/server

Solution: Zed Shaw

First Zed gave as SCGI_Rails – pure ruby, working on *nix (Linux, BSD, OS X) and Windows. Today I found also another way to skip fastcgi pain with Zed’s stuff – Mongrel :

• Using Lighttpd with Mongrel – have interesting tips for using mod_cml (Lua) for cache management
• Playing with Lighttpd, Litespeed, FCGI and Mongrel – some Lighttpd+Mongrel combi benchmarks

And by the way I wrote some notes about the Second Osaka Rails Meeting (Using runit) on the wiki. FastCGI, SCGI, Mongrel notes included.

Interesting lightweight combination will be:

• Camping framework for the MVC
• moo.fx for the Ajax effects

Somebody already done it?

To test the new wiki , i put there my notes from the 9th Ruby meeting in Osaka previous week. Interesting: now I can easy move pages between wiki, when they are work in progress and the typo pages, when they are finished.

It’s not about famous The Lord of the Rings movie. It’s about increasing the performance via using the unified tools. What I’m talking about:

• My everyday usage programming language of choice is Ruby
• My web applications are in Ruby: Ruby On Rails
• I hope my GUI programming will be in Ruby: RubyCocoa
• My automation tools are in Ruby: Rake (building), Capistrano (deployment)
• My web templates are in Ruby: eRb

The same is true for my online tools (the markup I’m using for creating the content):

• My weblog is Textile: Typo
• My presentation slides are in Textile: LightS5
• And finally yesterday I found a Textile based wiki for my documentation – StikiPad . Before I used Hieraki , but stikipad looks better.

All this make me productive (I hope, better ask my boss ;) )