Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008. It’s billed as the “Ruby conference for the South” and is sponsored by Engine Yard. Keynote speakers so far are David A. Black (of Ruby Central fame) and Chris Wanstrath (of GitHub fame). Registration is $149 until June 2nd.

And a Bonus: Toronto Rails Project Night!

The Toronto Rails Project Night is a much smaller affair than the Ruby Hoedown, but definitely deserves some attention if you’re in or near Toronto, Canada. The 5th one is being held next week on Tuesday, May 13th. It’s being held in the TSOT office at 151 Bloor Street West, Suite 1130, Toronto. You can submit an RSVP on FaceBook or e-mail corina.newby [-at-] tsotinc.com. The event kicks off at 5.45pm, a few presentations are planned, and a crawl to a nearby pub is expected afterwards.

It’s a rare occurrence, but there’s some “meta” news to give out about Ruby Inside. Regular programming follows this break!

FeedBurner Feed Ads Be Gone!

Subscribers to the Ruby Inside feed will be familiar with the graphical ads after each post. They perform horribly (think click through rates of 0.1%). I’m glad that Ruby Inside’s audience is so savvy and I’m sick of annoying you with irrelevant nonsense. Those ads are now gone.

Ruby Inside Turns 2 - So I Need To Eat My Hat

In just three weeks, Ruby Inside will be two years old. Unfortunately, two years ago I said I’d “eat my hat” if Ruby hadn’t beaten Python in the TIOBE index by May 2008. It hasn’t. I am currently sourcing a sugar hat. On the plus side, Ruby has moved from #20 to #9, while Python has moved only from #8 to #7. I’m not making any promises for next year, however.

Sponsored Post Footers - Not In A Sucky Way

I want to reassure you that Ruby Inside isn’t interested in payola. No incentives are received for writing about something here. Even the “Thank You to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors” posts are something I do out of courtesy; not a mandatory part of the deal.

In removing the FeedBurner ads (see above) I want to replace them with something useful to both you, the reader, and to those in the community who have something to promote. With that, I’m launching the concept of sponsoring the footer of a post (or multiple posts). It’s limited to a few lines of text, set off separately at the bottom of a post, with a link or two as necessary. Only things of interest to Ruby Inside readers will be allowed. The first couple will be going up soon, so keep an eye out. I

f you, your company or your project is interested in sponsoring posts, e-mail risp [/at/] peterc.org for more details. The big benefit in sponsoring posts is that the tagline will stay attached to the posts as long as Ruby Inside is around. You’ll also hit all 16,000 subscribers rather than just those who visit the site. You get the idea..

New Logo

If you haven’t seen it yet, Ruby Inside has a new logo. Blame Charles Nutter. I must say, though, I prefer this new one in any case.

For Sale?

It’s the first mention here, but followers of my Twitter stream will be aware I’ve considered selling or otherwise “changing the ownership structure” of Ruby Inside for a little while now. Investigations into this are only casual so far. One option is to farm out the advertising / commercial side to a team with the savvy to do that, and I have a very good proposal on the table for this already. The other option is to “sell up”, perhaps while still posting here, and let someone / a company with big ideas shake things up a bit.

In any case, it’s all very casual right now, but options are being explored. I still love working on Ruby Inside, I still love keeping up with the news, but I’m gradually moving into other areas with my big ideas, and am definitely not against Ruby Inside evolving to a new level under someone else’s wing. Contact me if you have any direct interest or ideas, or just comment here if you have general feedback.

Thank You!

Given that Ruby Inside’s turning two years’ old very soon, I want to thank you, the reader, for continuing to subscribe, continuing to support, and otherwise make working on Ruby Inside the amazing experience it is and has been.

Never one to let us down on the ingenuity front, Why The Lucky Stiff (author of the Poignant Guide and creator of Shoes) is busy working on a system that can convert Ruby 1.9 bytecode to Python bytecode (and from there into regular Python by way of Python’s decompilation facilities). It’s exactly the sort of thing that could take off with more eyes looking at it, and Why has made it available on GitHub. This technique isn’t likely to unite Python and Ruby in any deep and meaningful way (to the point of a shared interpreter), but the research and experiments involved are worth a try.

RubyFlow - the community based companion site to Ruby Inside - has been on fire! I’m finding out about lots of new stuff on there that then gets included into Ruby Inside posts. It’s the place to be if you want the most up to date Ruby and Rails news, but don’t mind putting up with a bit of ‘noise’.

Every two weeks or so I’m going to summarize some of the best items from RubyFlow here on Ruby Inside, so that you can still keep up with the latest developments even if you don’t want to be soaked in the firehose of Ruby news over there.

For the period April 24 to May 5, 2008:

Net::SSH 2.0 Released: Jamis Buck announces the release of Net::SSH 2.0 and the availability of Net::SFTP 2.0, Net::SCP 1.0, Net::SSH::Gateway 1.0 and Net::SSH::Multi 1.0.

Webistrano 1.3: Webistrano 1.3 has been released; read the announcement. Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

Automatic Migration Generator: Hobofields is an automatic migration generator for Rails / ActiveRecord users. Annotate your model with the fields required as you go, then Hobofields generates the required migrations.

Capistrano 2.3.0: Yehey! Capistrano 2.3.0 is released. It has many new tasty features!

Rails 2.1 Features: A summary of some of the nice new features coming in Rails 2.1. In short, many of the rough spots are being patched over!

Ruby and TextMate: An interesting introduction to TextMate’s Ruby bundle. A good place to start if you use TextMate but haven’t used any of the mnemonics and snippets the Ruby bundle provides (like me).

John Lam on Iron Ruby: A video update on Iron Ruby from John Lam recorded by David Laribee.

MetricFu: Jake Scruggs demonstrates how to use MetricFu to produce good looking metrics and reporting for your Rails application.

Merb Blogging Software: Announcing Feather, a Merb based blogging engine with a lightweight core framework, and a robust set of plugins, now open source and ready for contributions!

Parsing Quoted Strings: If you need to parse quoted strings in Ruby, a lesser-known module called Shellwords from the Ruby Standard Library is a handy utility.

It’s time to thank Ruby Inside’s excellent sponsors once again.

I’m keen to make these posts relevant, so I’ve tried to include any news or developments the sponsors have had within this post. For example, FiveRuns has interviewed several Rubyists over the last month, and links to those interviews are provided below. Also, Peepcode has released a new e-book, similarly linked. So even if you don’t care for what the sponsors are selling or providing, it’s worth a quick check to make sure you’re not missing out on anything useful.

Note: All blurbs and descriptions are written by me and not directly influenced or specified by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are mine and not necessarily shared by the sponsor(s)!

FiveRuns - Rails Application Monitoring Solutions

FiveRuns is a provider of Rails application (and server) monitoring services. FiveRuns works hard to be part of the community, whether by releasing a free Ruby and Rails stack or publishing a great set of interviews with Ruby developers on their blog. FiveRuns’ “TakeFive” series, where they ask Ruby developers five questions each, has continued, with Xavier Noria, Michael Slater (q.v.), Bruce Williams, Scott Diedrick, Juanjo Bazán, and Fabio Akita all being interviewed in the last month.

PeepCode - Rails Screencasts and E-Books

Who in the Ruby world doesn’t know Geoffrey Grosenbach and his PeepCode screencasts? PeepCode has been the longest sponsor of Ruby Inside. Peepcode’s latest release is the “Git Internals” e-book that delves into how Git works behind the scenes and how that affects your use of it.

Atlantic Dominion Solutions - Rails Consultancy and Development

Based in Orlando, Florida, Atlantic Dominion Solutions offer a full range of Rails consultancy and development services and were the brains behind the recent acts_as_conference Ruby and Rails conference. ADS founder Robert Dempsey is also behind the Rails For All project, a Rails advocacy group.

Job! Atlantic Dominion Solutions has an opening for a Web applications developer (using, of course, Ruby and Rails) to work in Winter Park, Florida (with Stillwater, Oklahoma as an alternative option.)

BrightBox - UK Ruby on Rails Hosting

BrightBox are a new Leeds, UK based (support the north!) hosting company specializing in high-end Ruby on Rails application deployment. There’s a pent-up demand for UK-based Rails hosting, and BrightBox offer a wide range of plans, from a basic VPS with 256MB of memory up to a 2GB-packed behemoth. The bandwidth allowances are pretty good by UK standards too, and all but the cheapest plan come with FiveRuns’ RM-Manage technology.

Building Web Apps - Rails Seminar and Podcast

BuildingWebApps has a free online Ruby on Rails course you can sign up to today. The instructors are Michael Slater and Christopher Haupt, both of who have a frankly intimidating amount of experience in the field of instruction and tuition. They also have a compelling (and free!) podcast called Learning Rails that’s worth subscribing to.

Morph eXchange - A Rails Application Hosting and Deployment Platform

Morph provides an interesting enterprise level platform for deploying Rails applications. No servers are needed and you don’t need to set anything up; the Morph platform does it all. Morph provides a fully managed service and handles load balancing, scaling and high availability issues, as well as the complete Web application stack. 24/7 monitoring services and managed backups are also provided. The CEO of Morph Labs compared a Morph “AppSpace” to a “service office for your application.” This YouTube video demonstrates how you can deploy a Rails application within 4 minutes on the Morph platform.

New Relic is a new entrant into the nascent Ruby on Rails® application monitoring market, so far dominated by FiveRuns. The company has just taken $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from heavyweights Benchmark Capital. Rather impressively, New Relic has already been featured on TechCrunch, where writer Mark McGranaghan notes that New Relic’s founder, Lewis Cirne, previously ran a similar company in the Java space.

New Relic’s primary product at this time is “RPM,” a subscription-based Rails “Performance Management” solution. It provides useful information that Rails developers can use to quickly detect, diagnose and fix application performance problems. There are a lot of pretty graphs and charts on the RPM product page from which you get an idea of what sort of information it presents.

It is worth noting, however, that FiveRuns’ RM-Manage appears to provide more features at the moment, although without knowing New Relic’s pricing, it may still be better value depending on your needs. RM-Manage not only provides live Rails application monitoring, but also overall server monitoring (including OS, database, Web daemon, swap usage, etc.), as well as triggers and events to automatically notify you of changes or issues. I’ve also heard from a credible source that FiveRuns has some exciting new enhancements in the pipeline, due to be unveiled at RailsConf.

New Relic’s launch is newsworthy, however, not only because of the investment (something matched in the Ruby / Rails scene by FiveRuns and Engine Yard) but because the hype surrounding its launch demonstrates that both the press and investors are now seeing plays in the Ruby and Rails space as serious business rather than quirky gambles.

Insoshi is a new, open-source social networking platform developed in Ruby on Rails. It’s on GitHub, so you can fork it to your heart’s content, and it can act as a base for developing your own social Web application. Features include activity feeds, profiles, photo sharing, comment walls, blogs, forums, user messaging, and an admin panel.

Insoshi was developed by Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace, an Addison-Wesley published book about developing a social networking site in Rails. Hartl certainly practices what he preaches! It is important to note, however, that Insoshi is licensed under the Affero General Public License, so making the source code available for your derivative sites is necessary.

Lovd By Less is a similar system previously mentioned here on Ruby Inside that’s also open source and free to use. From what I can make out, both systems are very similar in terms of features (profiles, messaging, blogs, admin system, etc. but Lovd By Less has the edge by being MIT-licensed, making it easier to use in your own commercial applications.

Migrating to Ruby 1.9 was a presentation given by Bruce Williams at Scotland on Rails earlier this month. The slides, available in PDF format, stand on their own extremely well, and will prove a useful resource for anyone not too deeply engrossed in Ruby 1.9 yet. Bruce covers most of the key changes.

As an aside, Bruce was interviewed by Satish Talim of RubyLearning.com recently.

Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls [Implementations] is a lengthy, but interesting, essay by Charles Nutter of the JRuby team. He looks at Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MacRuby, and some minor implementations, and covers their background along with their current development state and how they might proceed in future. For those interested in the state of the many Ruby implementations, this is a must read.

For those who want a shorter version without any of the context or smart insight Charles brings: the Ruby 1.8.7 previews have thrown a spanner in the works, Ruby 1.9 still doesn’t run Rails (but will very soon), Ruby 1.9 might not prove better enough to woo developers, JRuby rocks, Rubinius is cool but improving performance will be hard, Rubinius seems to be retreating to using more and more C primitive functions and moving away from “Ruby in Ruby”, IronRuby is clever but might have trouble running Rails properly, MacRuby is a great idea, and all of the other, minor implementations seem stuck in the mud.

Trivia: Two Freudian slips when writing this post. I mis-typed “Peril” as “Perl” in both cases.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz (of Merb and Engine Yard fame) has been spending quite a bit time playing with Rails®, both by cleaning up parts of ActionPack but, more significantly, porting Merb’s Rack mechanics to Rails. He has a personal fork of Rails on Github where he’s doing all the work.

It might not sound particularly impressive work from this description, but Ezra appears to be doing some good work in bringing the Rails dispatch system up to modern standards, and that can only help with Rails’ performance and stability in future. Ezra has also made the mutex locks more granular which provides a “speed boost with standard Mongrel under concurrent load” although more thread-safety testing is, he readily admits, required.

Perhaps more developments on this front will lead to a much needed mod_rack to make deploying Ruby applications on the Web easier without workaround techniques like SwitchPipe or mod_rails. So, let’s give Ezra some applause, and hope he (and maybe others) will keep up this great work :)