Aquarium is a framework that implements Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) for Ruby. The premise of AOP is that some concerns in an application will cut across the natural object boundaries of the problem domain. Rather than scatter duplicated code in each object to handle the cross-cutting concern, AOP modularizes the specification of which execution points are affected (called join points) and the actions that should be invoked at those points.

New in V0.4.0: Preliminary support for advising Java classes in JRuby! See the discussion here.

See also the RubyForge project page.

Usage

Aquarium provides a Domain Specific Language (DSL) with which you can express “aspectual” system behaviour in a modular way, i.e., using a succinct language and without repeating yourself all over your code base!

Imagine you want to trace all invocations of the public, instance methods in all classes whose names end with “Service”. Here’s how you can implement that behavior in Aquarium:

class ServiceTracer
    include Aquarium::Aspects::DSL::AspectDSL
    before :calls_to => :all_methods, :in_types => /Service$/ do |join_point, object, *args|
      log "Entering: #{join_point.target_type.name}##{join_point.method_name}: object = #{object}, args = #{args}"
    end
    after :calls_to => :all_methods, :in_types => /Service$/ do |join_point, object, *args|
      log "Leaving: #{join_point.target_type.name}##{join_point.method_name}: object = #{object}, args = #{args}"
    end
end
A more succinct implementation of this behavior uses #around advice:

class ServiceTracer
    include Aquarium::Aspects::DSL::AspectsDSL
    around :calls_to => :all_methods, :in_types => /Service$/ do |join_point, object, *args|
      log "Entering: #{join_point.target_type.name}##{join_point.method_name}: object = #{object}, args = #{args}"
      result = join_point.proceed
      log "Leaving: #{join_point.target_type.name}##{join_point.method_name}: object = #{object}, args = #{args}"
      result  # block needs to return the result of the "proceed"!
    end
end
See the Examples and the API section for more details.

Start Here

$ gem install -y aquarium

See the download page for different options or go directly to Rubyforge download page.

more resources: Aquarium.rubyforge home page.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Monkeybars is a library that enables you to make use of Swing from JRuby.

Monkeybars aims to allow you to continue using the GUI editing tools you are used to but makes it easy to write all your application logic in pure Ruby. In fact, with most editors you’ll never even have to look at Java code.

Monkeybars was created from a pretty specific need. Rising Tide Software company was working on a large Swing application and wanted to be able to easily write all the logic in Ruby via JRuby. The initial attempts laid the groundwork for what was to become Monkeybars. Monkeybars has an emphasis on using normal Swing development tools (using Netbeans 6) and especially the ability to sit down with a client and use a visual designer to create the Swing layouts.

To this end, Monkeybars is designed to reach in and integrate itself with a Java class without any special consideration on the Java side. This means Monkeybars should work with Java code emitted from any Swing form designer, we don’t parse the code directly so there is no issue with code formatting or code conventions used inside the class.

Want to set up mouse event listeners on all elements in your form?

add_listener :type => :mouse

Or how about declaring that only the components okButton and cancelButton should get mouse events?

add_listener :type => :mouse, :components => ["okButton", "cancelButton"]

Testing

A second important consideration for us was testability. Our early attempts to create a Ruby interface to Swing left us with brittle, difficult to test code. Therefore in Monkeybars we implemented a stark separation between controller and view. All* communication between the two is accomplished via a model which is just a plain Ruby class. This keeps your controllers much more testable. The views also are typically smaller and much easier to test, only being concerned with their methods to convert data from and back into the model.

For further details visit: Monkeybars project page

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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.

Sometimes it’s nice to use a database with a different paradigm. RDDB might be just what you’re looking for:

RDDB is a Ruby document-oriented database system inspired by CouchDB and developed by Anthony Eden. Querying is accomplished through views using Ruby for the view language and materialization can be handled locally or through a distributed system.

You can create a database and insert documents in a simple enough way:

# First create an database object

database = Rddb::Database.new

# Put some documents into it
database << {:name => 'John', :income => 35000}
database << {:name => 'Bob', :income => 40000}

To “query” the database, you define a “view” using a Ruby block, as such:

# Create a view that will return the names
database.create_view('names') do |document, args|

  document.name

end

# The result of querying will return an array of names

assert_equal ['John','Bob','Jim'], database.query('names')

Just as the local document store, this engine is easy to setup and follows the same semantics for caching, data partitioning, and index accesses.

In all, RDDB is a great example of how much can be accomplished with some thoughtfully laid out Ruby code. The codebase is tiny, and yet the product is amazingly feature rich. Having said that, there is definitely a lot of work to be done before RDDB can become a production-type system.

Read more on:

• Igvita
• RDDB Homepage
  
• Ruby Inside

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Just out is ActiveRecord-JDBC 0.6, the post-RubyConf release.

The sparkly new feature is Rails 2.0 support. In the soon-to-be-released Rails 2.0 (edge), Rails will automatically look for and load an adapter gem based on the name of the adapter you specify in database.yml.

let’s see the example:

development:

  adapter: funkdb

  ...

We can leverage this convention to make it easier than ever to get started using JRuby with your Rails application. So, the first thing new in the 0.6 release is the name. You now install activerecord-jdbc-adapter:

jruby -S gem install activerecord-jdbc-adapter

But wait, there’s more! We also have adapters for four open-source databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and two embedded Java databases, Derby and HSQLDB. And, for your convenience, we’ve bundled the JDBC drivers in dependent gems, so you don’t have to go hunting them down if you don’t have them handy.

if you need to connect to a different database, you’ll still need to place your database’s JDBC driver jar file in the appropriate place and use the straight activerecord-jdbc-adapter. Also note that in this case, and for Rails 1.2.x in general, you’ll still need to add that pesky require statement to config/environment.rb.

As always, there are bug fixes too (though we haven’t been tracking exactly which ones are fixed). We’re starting to file ActiveRecord-JDBC bugs in the JRuby JIRA now, and will be putting in future AR-JDBC versions to target soon too. So, please file new bugs in JIRA (and select component “ActiveRecord-JDBC”) rather than in the antiquated Rubyforge tracker.

Read more on Nick Sieger’s blog.

Related posts:

1. NetBeans IDE 6.8 Released — with Enhanced Ruby on Rails Support! NetBeans IDE version 6.8 has been released, Sun Microsystems’...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

NetBeans 6 Beta 1 is here!!

Let’s rock the boat

It’s the first significant NetBeans event in probably a year

NetBeans isn’t only for Java geeks anymore, it has tons of Ruby and Ruby on Rails support now!

What surprises me (and delights me!) about this release is that, not like previous NetBeans 6 milestones where NetBeans-Java is bundled with Ruby, they actually make a special Ruby-only version.

The Ruby-only download is mere 19 MB in size!

That’s quite “cheap” (in terms of bandwidth usage). I’d expect the Ruby version to be less memory bloat and should have better performance as well, than the mammoth 172 MB one

I have been using NetBeans 6 for several months now, starting from the first NetBeans+Ruby version which is NetBeans 6 Milestone 7, and I can say I’m very impressed.

I’m still downloading Beta 1 and haven’t yet installed Beta 1 at the time of this writing, but I can be sure it’s gonna be event better than the last NetBeans 6 Milestone 10.

Don’t let the “Milestone” or “Beta” name put you off, it’s already usable in more ways than most software.

Check out why George Cook says Netbeans THE best ruby on rails IDE:

… I was gonna write a blow for blow comparison of netbeans against radrails, but I really see no point. I figured it’s best just to tell you why netbeans’ rails support is so creamingly good, but so you know I have evaluated both and textmate, firstly – here’s some points about the other 2. …

… I looked about and by chance came across an article that said that ruby on rails support was being added to netbeans 6. I hunted around like a crack addict and found the nightly builds to try out.

I was extremely impressed.

Netbeans is fucking fab, it proper rocks. I’ve been on netbeans 6 since milestone 8, which is about 1,000 builds now (they’re constantly working on it, and updating it). I’ve been with it through broken indentation, broken code completion, broken everything, null pointers, new features, more efficiency, the memory leak sorted out. I’ve watched it evolve before my eyes: I was installing new builds twice a day – Now it’s so stable and so good that I haven’t updated my build in a month (I might later on .
Code completion that works – really really works:
Code completion is activated with CTRL + SPACE – once activated you can type, or select from the list:

And here are what the diffs look like in the files themselves:

In line documentation when you need it, where you need it:
Just press CTRL+SPACE on a keyword and you get the docs.

Click on rescue, or move the caret over it with the cursor keys:

code folding:
You use the + and – buttons to fold code

(Read his article for more info. He has a very comprehensive review of many NetBeans-Ruby features!)

Michael Urban has his own opinion in Move Over Eclipse. NetBeans 6 Rocks!:

Ok, I admit the title is a bit inflammatory to Eclipse fans. But after working with NetBeans 6 over the last week, I have to say I am very impressed. This is not simply a minor upgrade, as is so common in IDEs these days even when they are given a new major version number. Quite the contrary, NetBeans 6 is a major new release, and a major improvement over NetBeans 5.5.

A roundup of NetBeans Ruby-specific features in this release:

Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails Support

• Project Support. Quickly create Ruby projects with logical structure, run Ruby files, configure other Ruby interpreters (such as JRuby or native Ruby), locate and install Ruby Gems through a graphical wizard, create and execute unit tests, run RSpec specification files, jump between a Ruby file and its corresponding unit test or spec file, and so on. View Demo.
• Advanced Ruby Editing. Advanced code editing for Ruby, using semantic information about the program to offer code completion, showing available classes and methods for the current expression, along with the associated RDoc documentation. The syntax highlighting is enhanced with semantic information, such that unused local variables and parameters are shown in gray. There are many other editing features, including Goto Declaration for jumping to the declaration point of a class or method reference. View Demo.
• Ruby Debugger. Single-step or run through Ruby code, set breakpoints, look at local variables, navigate the call stack, switch threads, and evaluate expressions by just hovering the mouse over the variable in the Editor. There is also support for the “fast debug” extension.
• Ruby on Rails Support. Generate Rails projects, or generate code through the Rails code generator graphical wizard, which offers documentation on the plugins within the wizard itself. Third party generators are also supported. Furthermore, there are actions for jumping quickly between a Rails action and its corresponding View, or warping to the browser for the URL most relevant to the file you are editing. Database migrations and Rake targets are supported as well. Finally, RHTML files are highlighted (along with improved NetBeans 6.0 support for related files, such as JavaScript and CSS). View Demo.

And also:

• Quick Fixes
  • Automatic detection of block variables that might be accidentally modifying local variables

• • Rails deprecation warnings which identify usages of deprecated Rails idioms (enable this warning in the Ruby options panel)

• • Quick which finds same-line definitions of classes or methods and offer to explode these into multiline, formatted definitions

• • A number of experimental hints compatible with Beta 1 but not bundled; access these from the Plugin manager. These hints can convert between do and brace-style blocks, they warn about “wrong” name conventions for Ruby symbols, they offer to run the Rails generator to generate missing views for action methods, they identify possible incorrect usage of attributes
  • More information about the Ruby quick fixes
• RHTML formatting (and improvements to the Ruby formatting algorithm). A new formatting preferences panel allows configuration of the continuation indent as well as enabling reformatting of comments.
• Updated bundled JRuby to version 1.0.1
• Ability to deploy Rails projects to Java EE application servers
• YAML code folding and navigator, improved RHTML navigator
• Go To Declaration in RHTML files now work to warp to partials, redirect_to, link_to, etc.

• Large number of bug fixes and tweaks

Diff

• Export Diff Patch – CVS and Subversion integration
  • based on unified diff
  • automatically opens generated patch file into the editor with colored annotations

Don’t forget the general improvements as well:

Editor Improvements

• Smarter code completion. The NetBeans editor is quicker and smarter, providing completions for keywords, fields, and variables. It also lists the most logical options at the top, and lets you dig down into the full options at the bottom
• Highlights. You can think of the highlights feature as an easy-to-use and more correct substitution for the editors Search. The IDE tracks the position of the caret and, based on it, highlights some parts of the code. The highlights are marked with a background color in the editor they are also put into the error stripe, which permits for having overview of the whole file.
• Better Navigation and Inspection. In addition to Highlights, the source editor lets you quickly navigate through your code with improved Navigator window organization and the Members and Hierarchy Inspectors.
• More than just code completion. With live templates and Surround With functionality, you can quickly enter commonly used blocks of code and focus on the business logic.
• There is much more. See the Java Editor User’s Guide.

Update: And more from Peter Cooper of Ruby Inside:

NetBeans is a powerful and free. You can create Ruby and Rails projects, run Ruby files, configure interpreters (MRI and JRuby), install Gems graphically, run tests, run RSpecs, debug Ruby code, run Rails apps, and so on, all from the IDE. The Ruby edition is only a 19MB download and it’s available right now. There are several Ruby related NetBeans screencasts for the less convinced.

Already more than enough evangelizing, I guess…

Head on to NetBeans 6 Release page to find out more and download.

Related posts:

1. NetBeans IDE 6.8 Released — with Enhanced Ruby on Rails Support! NetBeans IDE version 6.8 has been released, Sun Microsystems’...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Aptana IDE is one of my favorite free development tools for Ruby on Rails web applications.

Below is a screenshot of Aptana in action… with a small just-created application.

Over the past few months, Aptana has been adding more and more cool features. In addition to the JavaScript, DOM, CSS, HTML, and AJAX Libraries (including Script.aculo.us) offline reference that has been there for a long time, relatively recent additions include:

• Apple iPhone Development Support
  The Apple iPhone Development Plugin (beta) enables the Aptana IDE to
  increase your iPhone development productivity. You’ll need the newest
  version of Aptana (build 15637) to take advantage of it. [screencast]
• Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) Support
  Aptana IDE now offers support for Adobe AIR. Adobe AIR allows
  developers to leverage their existing web development skills (HTML,
  JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, and Flex ) to build and deploy rich Internet
  applications (RIA’s) to the desktop. [screencast]
• RadRails plugin
  Along with long-time support for Ruby and Rails, the newest version includes support for managing and installing Rubygems, among others. [screencast]

Aptana IDE is really cool! Kudos to the Aptana team!

My other favorite is NetBeans by Sun. Yes I’m referring to the latest 6.0 Preview, which at this writing is NetBeans 6.0 M10. The NetBeans team is doing really good job too!

I’m a bit sad actually that there are at least two big open source groups developing two open source applications that do roughly the same thing. Both are rich-client platforms. Both is built on Java. Both supports other languages beside Java. Both are… There are just too many similarities (from the user perspective). One notable difference is that NetBeans bundles so many tools in one go (Ruby support, Glassfish, JRuby, etc.)

All in all, we’re living in a good world. There’s only one world anyway, so we can’t exactly say the opposite.

Related posts:

1. NetBeans IDE 6.8 Released — with Enhanced Ruby on Rails Support! NetBeans IDE version 6.8 has been released, Sun Microsystems’...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A very nice article by Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks. When you read it from a customer/client/procurer/corporate perspective, it’s quite revealing.  Allow me to quote specific parts that I like:

… JRuby offers the choice of just deploying into a Java container, turning a Rails app into an easily deployed war file. I think this will make Ruby on Rails a much more viable choice in lots of enterprise environments.

There seems an excellent chance that Ruby and Rails could become a significant platform for IT develop over the next few years. We’re already seeing signs of this at ThoughtWorks – 40% of our new business this year in the US is Ruby work.

[Ruby/Rails] Success is not just being an outbreak of sanity in the IT world, but actually leading that world.

Technologies that make it harder for programmers to do what they like to do best – make a difference for the businesses they are supporting. (This week’s memorable tale was of a large company that spent eight million dollars on an enterprise-wide version control system that couldn’t branch properly.)

I definitely wouldn’t want that last one happen to anyone… (again)

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Think Ruby kicks ass? Then imagine Ruby’s power and fun coupled with the plethora of Java libraries: JRuby.

It’s a real jirb (irb which runs in JRuby) session using the open source LemonSMS and RXTX libraries to communicate with my mobile phone. No more need to Ant-build a whole project just to try a few nifty tricks.

JRuby is now approaching version 1.0 and is already able to run most Ruby applications including Rails, and is being used by software development companies like ThoughtWorks. You can even develop Swing GUI applications in Ruby, and all Java libraries should work with JRuby since it’s still “native” Java.

Let me know what experiences you have with JRuby.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.