AdaRuby » Cool

Migrating Subversion repositories using SVK

ceefour — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:02:41 +0000

Recently I got a task which involves moving, or let’s say copying, an entire Subversion repository with history to another server. Problem is, I didn’t have access to the server itself, which means I couldn’t do a regular “svnadmin dump”.

SVK comes to the rescue!

To make it work, first of all you need to install SVK. In Ubuntu it goes like this:

sudo aptitude install svk

When you first run svk it’ll ask you to create a local depot, you can simply agree to its suggestion.

Now we mirror both of the Subversion repositories we’re trying to import and export from and to. Note that you need to create the destination repository first.

svk mirror //source http://svn.source.com/project1/
svk mirror //dest http://svn.dest.com/newproject/

A bit of niceness with this method instead of a regular svn dump/load procedure is that:

you can import to a different folder/subfolder instead of the root folder
you can do a partial export (subfolder of project repository)

Before doing the actual migration process, let’s sync these mirrors first:

svk sync //source
svk sync //dest

And then you’ll do the real thing. But we can simulate it first by using “–check-only”, kinda’ like when you simulate a DVD burning session before actually writing it.

svk smerge //source //dest --incremental --log --sync --verbatim --track-rename --baseless --check-only

There are several switches that I used above, feel free to use them only as needed:

-I [--incremental]: apply each change individually
-l [--log]: use logs of merged revisions as commit message
-B [--baseless]: use the earliest revision as the merge point
-s [--sync]: synchronize mirrored sources before update
–verbatim: verbatim merge log without indents and header
–track-rename: track changes made to renamed node
-C [--check-only]: try operation but make no changes

After you’re ready, redo the above command without “–check-only”:

svk smerge //source //dest --incremental --log --sync --verbatim --track-rename --baseless

Simply wait several minutes–or possibly hours (or days!) if your project is sufficiently large–for SVK to do its job for you!

Are there disadvantages of using SVK to a “genuine” SVN dump/load? Sure, among them is that the original author names are lost.

Good luck!

Morph Application Platform Simplifies Ruby on Rails Development

ceefour — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:46:07 +0000

Morph Labs is currently beta-testing their next-generation solution in application deployment, delivery, and management, the Morph Application Platform.

Acquiring hardware and configuring software to support web apps are things of the past. Morph Labs brings you the next-generation solution in application deployment, delivery, and management. Reduce your time to market and lower your startup costs no matter if you are an ISV, a developer or a business.

About Morph Labs

Morph Labs Inc. www.morphexchange.com is a Philippine-based Web 2.0 technology company focused on providing innovative technologies and applications to support Software as a Service (SaaS) globally.

Morph offers independent software vendors (ISVs), IT consulting organizations, application developers and entrepreneurs the quickest and simplest route to SaaS-enablement. Morph simplifies deployment and management of software as a service with an elastic Web 2.0 delivery and management solution — the Morph Application Platform.

Morph Application Platform, powered by Amazon EC2 grid computing technology, combines the elasticity in delivering and managing Web 2.0 applications and the simplicity of deploying software as a service (SaaS).

With no hardware to buy and no software to install and configure, Morph allows developers to easily grow or shrink their application environment on demand without disruption to the application. The Morph Application Platform is offered through a subscription to a Morph AppSpace, which is an instance of the Morph Application Platform.

Beyond delivery platforms and managed services, Morph will build simplified software applications (that run on our platform) that leverage open source technologies for small and medium businesses.

Morph’s first on-demand application is Morph helpME (released October 2007), provided via the software as a service model and runs on top of the Morph Application Platform. It’s an on-demand help and training system that enables sharing of knowledge while reducing overall cost and technical burden.

Morph helpME is a Ruby on Rails application running on the Morph Application Platform. It’s automatically formats, structures and creates menus, enabling faster deployment of new content.

If you are Ruby on Rails developers, bring your on-demand application to life with the Morph Application and leave the details to us!

Visit Morph home page to find out more!

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Design Patterns in Ruby: Software Engineering, The Ruby Way

ceefour — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:21:43 +0000

Design Patterns in Ruby documents smart ways to resolve many problems that Ruby developers commonly encounter. Addison-Wesley Professional press has this exciting book, authored by Russ Olsen.

Russ Olsen has done a great job of selecting classic patterns and augmenting these with newer patterns that have special relevance for Ruby. Most design pattern books are based on C++ and Java. But Ruby is different—and the language’s unique qualities make design patterns easier to implement and use.

In this book, Russ Olsen demonstrates how to combine Ruby’s power and elegance with patterns, and write more sophisticated, effective software with far fewer lines of code.The book especially calls attention to Ruby features that simplify the use of patterns, including dynamic typing, code closures, and “mixins” for easier code reuse.

Design Patterns in Ruby also identifies innovative new patterns that have emerged from the Ruby community. These include ways to create custom objects with metaprogramming, as well as the ambitious Rails-based “Convention over Configuration” pattern, designed to help integrate entire applications and frameworks.

More resources:

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RM-Manage: Monitor Your Rails Apps

ceefour — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:29:25 +0000

RM-Manage is a monitoring product for Rails applications. Their claim:

Building elegant and powerful Rails applications rapidly is important. Ensuring that they perform properly once deployed in production is even more important. A poorly performing or unavailable business-critical application can have a devastating impact on your bottom line, negating the benefits of Rails development.

Rails applications are more than just Rails itself. Databases like MySQL and Oracle, web servers such as Apache, and even the host operating system each affect performance and availability.

Although you may have done a great job designing a well-behaved Rails application, the fact is you won’t know how well it will truly perform until you monitor and respond to it in production. RM-Manage wraps the task of monitoring your applications in a simple and affordable interface.

Application Browser

The Application Browser for Rails allows you to view and filter important performance metrics for your production Rails applications. The application browser quickly gathers collected Model, View and Controller statistics such as averages, slowest and fastest performing models or views and more making it easy to explore application problems and bottlencks.

Screen Highlights

Browse and select a particular system and production Rails application for which to view performance metrics.

See a full list of actions in the selected application grouped by their respective controllers. Select an action to see all its related MVC information.

Take a closer look at the amount of time spent in the controller, model and view layers.

Filter method invocation information by the model, view or controller layer to see common metrics such as average, slowest and fastest invocation times, ordered by severity for the currently selected filter.

As your applications evolve and expand, you will encounter performance and availability problems. How will you troubleshoot and accurately diagnose these issues? How will you know for sure if the problem is a bug, a memory leak, a database connection issue, or a design issue? How will you ensure performance and uptime?

RM-Manage is the first and only Rails application monitoring product to instrument and monitor all aspects of the Rails framework and its supporting infrastructure resources.

RM-Manage makes it easy to design your Rails applications for optimal performance and reliability. Define personalized views of performance data (timings, counts, errors, size) based on how you want to view your application. Use the other integrated monitoring services to provide you with all the tools you’ll need to troubleshoot your application and its underlying infrastructure.

Interested? Read more at FiveRuns’ site.

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Business Intelligence Made Easy: Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

ceefour — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:15:33 +0000

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is a great book for Ruby and Rails developers seeking to create compelling business intelligence and reporting solutions using a wide variety of applications and services. Published by Apress, and the author is David Berube.

Business intelligence and real-time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward-looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.

Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide-ranging array of features. Note this isn’t a staid guide to generating traditional reports, but rather it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.

There’s a lot to learn from this book, including:

Create reporting solutions for both the Web and the desktop.

Integrate with powerful third-party retail solutions such as eBay, and Amazon.com in order to monitor your sales campaigns in real-time.

Build an invoice reporting system using Rails and PayPal.

Monitor your sales performance by taking advantage of SugarCRM’s web service offerings.

More resources:

Editorial review at Amazon.com

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Sexy Time Zones in Ruby on Rails with Timezone_Fu

ceefour — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:23:17 +0000

As easy as:
has_timezone :fields => [ :start_datetime, :end_datetime]
Timezone_fu makes it really easy to deal with datetime fields in your models. It adds a method to your models, has_timezone.

The README for the plugin describes all of the options but below is an example:

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_timezone :fields => [ :start_datetime, :end_datetime]
end

The model has three fields a start_datetime and end_datetime and a timezone. Adding has_timezone to the model changes the behavior of the two datetime attributes.
Notice below that calling event.start_datetime shows the time in local time (”America/New York”).
>> event = Event.find(:first)=> #
       “end_datetime”   => “2007-11-21 15:00:00″,
      “start_datetime” => “2007-11-21 14:15:00″,
      “timezone”       => “America/New_York”}
>> event.start_datetime
=> Wed Nov 21 09:15:00 UTC 2007
>> event.display_start_datetime
=> “Nov. 21, 2007 09:15 AM”
>> event.utc_start_datetime
=> Wed Nov 21 14:15:00 UTC 2007
You can also set the value of the field to a local date/time and it will be converted to UTC automatically: >> event.start_datetime = Time.now => Sun Nov 25 06:26:35 +0000 2007 => # “end_datetime” => “2007-11-21 15:00:00″ “start_datetime” => Sun Nov 25 11:26:35 +0000 2007, “timezone” => “America/New_York” } If you want to access the fields and retrieve the database value you can use the utc_field_name method to access the UTC value of the attribute. The plugin makes a couple of core assumptions. One it assumes that the default rails timezone is UTC: ENV[‘TZ’] = ‘UTC’ Second it assumes that the model has a timezone attribute named timezone: t.column :timezone, :string, :default => ”

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Ruby on Rails, Java EE, RIA, Adobe Flex, Comet, Messaging, EDA, SOA, …, ouch!! ceefour — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:25:37 +0000 You know what, I really wanna learn this whole JavaEE-related thingy…… For some reason it’s unavoidable……. it’s bound to be touched by me…… You see, the trend is going RIA. MVC is going away. AJAX ain’t gonna compete. At least not fully. And will lose in many ways in respect to something like Adobe’s Flex. (Unfortunately there’s not much competitor better than Flex, and fortunately it’d probably be “standard” in the near future). Esp. with Flex going open source. Flex will need a backend, since it’s not a server-side product. There is Flex LiveCycle Data Services ES (what a name!!) by Adobe. There’s also BlazeDS open source. There’s also the excellent WebORB, which is free and open source for Rails and PHP. Oh yeah, it’s free for Rails! Sure you can go with plain Rails, but it’s maybe too much work, when WebORB already does it for you. This is wonderful, but it only gives you plain RPC. It’s traditional (legacy?) synchronous RPC camouflaged as “asynchronous”. Real asynchronous power comes from Messaging. And the buzzword is now Comet. The latest Jetty already supports Comet technique, which can continuously “streams” asynchronous messages and data to (instead of being pulled) your client-side web UI… (that might just be a Flex app) Simple messaging is fine, but the real power of messaging comes from features that had existed for a long time it’s actually legacy, such as publish/subcribe, message routing, and reliable delivery and timeouts. Fortunately, we have ActiveMQ, and yes we have activemessaging library for Ruby and Rails plugin. Unfortunately messaging servers have different protocols. Although there are “universal” protocols like Stomp and AMQP (backed by RabbitMQ), you can also use an ESB like Mule or OpenESB or Apache ServiceMix if your component needs to talk to components with a different protocol. Oh yes they’re from the Java world. Even as we’re embracing THE ActiveRecord, the Java community coming up with an also-cool solution called JPA, supported by all popular Java ORM tools such as Hibernate and TopLink; Microsoft strikes back with the invulnerable LINQ. Yet we still have too many queued messages and database records to handle, we need to know how to make use of them. EDA comes to the rescue, like what Esper does. And of course BI and reporting tools such as JasperReports, Pentaho and Ruby’s Ruport. We like REST’s simplicity over WS-* for enterprise-y SOA apps. Microformats is very nice with just a little Hpricot and Mofo goodness. And thanks to Mechanize or Scrubyt or openkapow and the good ole’ RSS, mashup is always getting easier. Let’s hope Atom’s APP really does take off as well. But sometimes we want more flexibility, we want BPM-powered workflow. No worries, we have JBoss’ jBPM. Our Ruby community also has OpenWFEru! Everybody hates the login form, especially if it comes more often than we brush our teeth. We want SSO, be it CAS, OpenID, SAML, or plain LDAP (with OpenLDAP), we want it now. And no, I haven’t forgotten Android, nor iPhone, nor Symbian, nor Windows Mobile. The mobile space is getting more, not less, fragmented. All because they know the market is growing. Everybody wants a pie. (me too!) You’ve heard him. Not all startups are profitable. Especially not when we’re fighting with each other. The “enterprise”, and corporate, has money… (unfortunately not all of us do, no matter how much we [all] want it…) Users are getting more demanding and demands are getting more complicated, so are the technologies. We probably should embrace these technologies and the people who work on them (whether paid or unpaid or voluntary or forced…!) more so than we criticize and demotivate each other. Ruby is a great tool, and so is Java (JVM) and so is JRuby and its close mates like Groovy, Scala, Jython, and Rhino with ECMAScript 4 and E4X support. Some people are also starting to fall in love with Erlang. Oh well… This isn’t a rant. It’s just a brain-dump from me. Hope somebody finds it useful. Good morning guys UPDATE: Clarifications regarding WebORB and messaging protocols. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Update Your Ruby Environment Using Portable Ruby ceefour — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:31:37 +0000 The goal of Portable Ruby is to reduce those updates to a single place, your USB drive. About.com describes how to make this possible: Installing Ruby The easiest way to setup a Portable Ruby application is to start with an existing Ruby installation. I recommend the One-Click Installer. If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and install it. The entire Ruby distribution is created in a single “ruby” directory structure. Additional changes include the creation of shortcuts for the start menu, which we will simulate in the PortableApp menu. The One-Click Installer also updates the Windows PATH environment variable to include the ruby\bin directory. Layout the PortableApp Structure Another helpful tip is to install PortableApps to the root of your hard drive so you can easily test the integration of your Portable Ruby development. Using the earlier articles as a reference, install PortableApps to “C:\PortableRoot”. The next step is to create a standard PortableApp directory structure. To make this easy, you can download the Ruby Portable Template starter zip. In addition to the directory structure, the starter zip also contains files for creating the Ruby and SciTE Portable launchers. Unzip the Ruby Portable Template inside of the directory “C:\PortableRoot\PortableApps\”. Your directory structure should look similar to the following. C:\PortableRoot PortableApps OtherApps RubyPortable App AppInfo ruby Data settings Other RubyPortableSource RubySource At this point, you can copy the contents of the “ruby” directory the One-Click Installer created into the RubyPortable -> App -> ruby directory. Check your free space first. The directory is about 80MB, but I would plan on having additional free space for your projects. Once you have copied the Ruby directories over, you can uninstall the One-Click Installer. While this isn’t technically necessary, it is helpful to remove the changes to the Windows environment so they do not conflict with testing your setup of the Portable Ruby application. More information and instructions are available on About.com: Ruby page. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Extremely Good Ruby on Rails Book: The Rails Way ceefour — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:17:07 +0000 The latest entry in Addison-Wesley’s Professional Ruby Series is The Rails Way, by Obie Fernandez, is a long awaited book billing itself as the “expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications.” More precisely, the book dives into nearly every area of the Rails libraries and APIs and acts as a reference work for them. Coming in at about 850 pages, the book is physically very similar to The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. There’s no denying that these two books look good next to each other on the bookshelf, and a lot of comparison can be made between the two. Using detailed code examples, Obie systematically covers Rails’ key capabilities and subsystems. He presents advanced programming techniques, introduces open source libraries that facilitate easy Rails adoption, and offers important insights into testing and production deployment. Dive deep into the Rails codebase together, discovering why Rails behaves as it does– and how to make it behave the way you want it to. This book will help you: Increase your productivity as a web developer Realize the overall joy of programming with Ruby on Rails Learn what’s new in Rails 2.0 Drive design and protect long-term maintainability with TestUnit and RSpec Understand and manage complex program flow in Rails controllers Leverage Rails’ support for designing REST-compliant APIs Master sophisticated Rails routing concepts and techniques Examine and troubleshoot Rails routing Make the most of ActiveRecord object-relational mapping Utilize Ajax within your Rails applications Incorporate logins and authentication into your application Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own Integrate email services into your applications with ActionMailer Choose the right Rails production configurations Streamline deployment with Capistrano More resources: Editorial review at Amazon.com Review for this book at hasmanythrough blog No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Scraping Gmail with Mechanize and Hpricot ceefour — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:14:00 +0000 We’ve been doing a lot of scraping and mashups lately. So we’d love to share on how to do this. Fortunately Schadenfreude has written a good tutorial about using Mechanize and Hpricot to scrape Gmail. The tutorial uses mechanize and hpricot to login to gmail and return a list of Unread emails. Installation of required tools gem install mechanize --include-dependencies This will install both mechanize and hpricot. Usage Before we can scrape our gmail account, we will need to login. Mechanize is a lib for “automating interaction with websites”. It can store and send cookies as well so once we login our script will now have a session to putter around in as if it was a web browser. require 'rubygems' require 'mechanize' agent = WWW::Mechanize.new page = agent.get 'http://www.gmail.com' form = page.forms.first form.Email = '***your gmail account***' form.Passwd = '***your password***' page = agent.submit form After logging in gmail will try to redirect us to http://mail.google.com/mail?ui&auth=DC8F…. we need to follow this link. Using hpricot we can search for the meta redirect and grab the href attribute then have mechanize follow the link. page = agent.get page.search("//meta").first.attributes['href'].gsub(/'/,'') Note we need to strip the single quotes from around the url, i used gsub for this. The returned page will try to use javascript to load the interface but it will not work for use. Thankfully a noscript tag is included in the source and contains a helpful clue. Full source require 'rubygems' require 'mechanize' agent = WWW::Mechanize.new page = agent.get 'http://www.gmail.com' form = page.forms.first form.Email = '***your gmail account***' form.Passwd = '***your password***' page = agent.submit form page = agent.get page.search("//meta").first.attributes['href'].gsub(/'/,'') page = agent.get page.uri.to_s.sub(/\?.*$/, "?ui=html&zy=n") page.search("//tr[@bgcolor='#ffffff']") do |row| from, subject = *row.search("//b/text()") url = page.uri.to_s.sub(/ui.*$/, row.search("//a").first.attributes["href"]) puts "From: #{from}\nSubject: #{subject}\nLink: #{url}\n\n" email = agent.get url # .. end Enjoy the tutorial! Read more on Schadenfreude. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.