Just got a server hard drive crash

We should be back operational soon. In the mean time please bear with us. Thank you.

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Advanced Rails offers you an in-depth look at techniques for dealing with databases, security, performance, web services and much more.

O’Reilly Media, Inc. published an intermediate-to-expert Rails book, authored by Brad Ediger:

Chapters in this book help you understand not only the tricks and techniques used within the Rails framework itself, but also how to make use of ideas borrowed from other programming paradigms. Advanced Rails pays particular attention to building applications that scale — whether “scale” means handling more users, or working with a bigger and more complex database.

You’ll find plenty of examples and code samples that explain:

• Aspects of Ruby that are often confusing or misunderstood
• Metaprogramming
• How to develop Rails plug-ins Different database management systems
• Advanced database features, including triggers, rules, and stored procedures
• How to connect to multiple databases
• When to use the Active Support library for generic, reusable functions Security principles for web application design, and security issues endemic to the Web When and when not to optimize performance
• Why version control and issue tracking systems are essential to any large or long-lived Rails project
• Advanced Rails also gives you a look at REST for developing web services, ways to incorporate and extend Rails, how to use internationalization, and many other topics.

Advanced Rails is an essential resource for improving your skills on Rails through advanced techniques.

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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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I’d like to express a warm notice that AdaRuby.com might be down intermittently as we’ll be having major rearrangement and server upgrades of our hosting facilities in the coming days.

The upside is, when it’s done (and oh YES it will be done!), I’ll be providing you interesting information on the stuff that we’re doing, especially our experience regarding the hosting services that we have been using all this time.

Looking forward to hearing you share your experience as well!

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Canadian Web Hosting provides shared, VPS, and dedicated web hosting for Canadian sites. They operate from a 1st Class Colocation facility located at Harbour Center in downtown Vancouver, BC, Canada. The advantage to international (i.e. non-Canadian) hosting services are obvious: they are much faster to access from Canada (with an added bonus that you pay in your native Canadian Dollars currency! Hence, if your customers and/or your business is based on Canada, hosting your Rails site with them might be a perfect fit.

The shared hosting plans offered by Canadian Web Hosting starts from the tight-budget CAD$3.95/mo (2 year prepayment). Ruby on Rails support is provided with the CA Pro plan which is only CAD$15.95/month (2 year prepayment), with 3500 GB bandwidth, and 300 GB space. All the “standard” web hosting stuff, like PHP 4/5, MySQL, are available, including support for advanced features such as PostgreSQL, SSH, ColdFusion MX 8 (seriously), ImageMagick, and more.

There’s no initial setup fee (hosting account setup is free!) and they provide 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can try their services and features without risking anything, really.

VPS plans are also available starting from an affordable CAD$25.95/month (2 year prepaid), that some of you demanding more control would prefer. They also provide Intel Dual Core and Quad-Core Xeon-powered dedicated servers (with Red Hat/CentOS operating system), which would be more cost-effective for those who have larger number of clients or require better stability and guaranteed resources.

This is a sponsored post.

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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:

• “Design Patterns in Ruby” at Amazon.com
• Review at barnesandnoble homepage

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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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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

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Now that Leopard, the latest release of Mac OS X, is available to everyone, you may wonder what has changed from the Ruby developer’s perspective.

Ruby

Ruby in Leopard was framework’ized. It is now available in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework. Compatibility with the previous directory layout is preserved, /usr/bin/ruby and /usr/lib/ruby

Let see the example symbolic links that point inside the framework:

$ readlink /usr/bin/ruby
../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/bin/ruby
$ readlink /usr/lib/ruby
../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/ruby
$ readlink /usr/lib/libruby.1.dylib
../../System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/libruby.1.dylib

IRB

Now that readline support is available, IRB has command-line editing and history support.

IRB was modified to look at /etc/irbrc as the last possible place for a configuration file. Leopard ships an /etc/irbrc file that provides a default configuration for all IRB sessions, that requires RubyGems, activates auto-completion, switches to the simple prompt, and sets up a permanent history facility.

If you have a custom IRB configuration file in your home directory, or supply one to IRB from the command line, /etc/irbrc will be ignored. IRB currently doesn’t support the load of multiple configuration files.

GEMS

RubyGems in Leopard uses two gems repositories:

$ ruby -r rubygems -e "p Gem.path"
["/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8", "/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8"]

In order to add a new gem to the /System repository, you will have to explicitly point the GEM_HOME environment variable to it. Please note that you can uninstall or cleanup old gems that are in the /System repository. The gem_server utility is not part of the client distribution of Leopard. It is only provided in the server.

DTrace

DTrace static probes were added in the interpreter engine. We actually took the amazing patches that the Joyent guys wrote for Solaris, and modified the code a little bit to make it work under Leopard and to address some small problems.

RubyCocoa and Bridge Support

This is an Objective-C to Ruby bridge, is now delivered with the system, in /System/Library/Frameworks/RubyCocoa.framework. The version that we ship is actually 99%-based on the public 0.12.0 release, module some Leopard-only specific changes, that will soon be pushed upstream.

Both RubyCocoa and the BridgeSupport files come with any Leopard installation. You can find some examples in /Developer/Examples/Ruby/RubyCocoa.

For more details visit Mac OS Forge.

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It’s not just Rails 2.0 but another added bump in the minor version

There are thousands (literally, considering the Subversion revision numbers of improvements, including:

• Action Pack: Resources
• Action Pack: Multiview
• Action Pack: Record identification
• Action Pack: HTTP Loving
• Action Pack: Security
• Action Pack: Exception handling
• Action Pack: Cookie store sessions
• Action Pack: New request profiler
• Action Pack: Miscellaneous
• Active Record: Performance
• Active Record: Sexy migrations
• Active Record: Foxy fixtures
• Active Record: XML in, JSON out
• Active Record: Shedding some weight
• Active Record: with_scope with a dash of syntactic vinegar
• ActionWebService out, ActiveResource in
• ActiveSupport
• Action Mailer
• Rails: The debugger is back
• Rails: Clean up your environment
• Rails: Easier plugin order
• And hundreds upon hundreds of other improvements

It’s not my call so I’ll let David Heinemeier Hansson’s announcement at 37signals’ Riding Rails blog speak for real

To update your Rails (and everything!):

sudo gem update

PS: Rubygems 0.9.5 is also here, too! So, to update this:

sudo gem update --system

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