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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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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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

1. Browse and select a particular system and production Rails application for which to view performance metrics.
2. 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.
3. Take a closer look at the amount of time spent in the controller, model and view layers.
4. 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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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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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)=> #<Event:0×1b71b40 @attributes={
       “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
=> #<Biz::Event:0×1b71b40 @attributes={
  “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 => ”

Read more on: hackd.wordpress homepage.

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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.

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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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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.

<noscript><font face="arial">JavaScript must be enabled in order for you to use Gmail in standard view.
However, it seems JavaScript is either disabled or not supported by your browser.
To use standard view, enable JavaScript by changing your browser options, then <a href="">try again</a>.

<p>To use Gmail's basic HTML view, which does not require JavaScript,
<a href="?ui=html&zy=n">click here</a>.</p></font>

<p><font face="arial">If you want to view Gmail on a mobile phone or similar device
<a href="?ui=mobile&zyp=n">click here</a>.</font></p></noscript>

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.

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ActiveScaffold is a plugin for Ruby on Rails (also known as Rails) that provides dynamic model-based view generation. Instead of having to create pages by hand that display your models, ActiveScaffold will introspect your ActiveRecord models and dynamically generate a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface for managing those objects.

Installing ActiveScaffold

As ActiveScaffold is a Rails plugin, you can install it from a remote Web or Subversion server. The command below will check out the ActiveScaffold plugin from the ActiveScaffold Subversion server.

Install the latest version of the plugin:

script/plugin install http://activescaffold.googlecode.com/svn/tags/active_scaffold

Add this to your layout:

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>
<%= active_scaffold_includes %>

Add this to your controller:

active_scaffold :<your_model_name>

for example:

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  active_scaffold :user
end

That’s it! Your first ActiveScaffold is up and running.

The Model

Most modern Web application frameworks are based on the MVC (model, view, controller) pattern, and Rails is no different. The model represents the data stored in the database with each table having a corresponding ActiveRecord model class in Ruby.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to  rganization
end
class Organization < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :projects
  has_many :users
end
class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to  rganization
  has_many :projects_users
  has_many :administrators, :through => :projects_users, :source => :user,
           :conditions => "projects_users.role_type = 3"
  has_many :managers, :through => :projects_users, :source => :user,
           :conditions => "projects_users.role_type = 2"
  has_many :workers, :through => :projects_users, :source => :user,
           :conditions => "projects_users.role_type = 1"
end
class ProjectsUser < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :project
  belongs_to :user
end

Visit ActiveScaffold home page to find out more!

P.S.: Happy New Year from AdaRuby.com crew (Hendy & Eka)!

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