Recently at work, we were having some problems with our application. Most of the problems stemmed from the complicated nature of the application and some poor design that we had been trying to patch up for months. Finally, in November, we got clearance from my boss to rebuild the application as a series of mini-applications that would run behind the main UI.
Initially, we planned on using nanite to distribute the application, passing messages between each mini-application, however, there was a problem getting the nanite mapper to work, so we explored other options and within a few hours we had a working version of beanstalk—a simple message queuing system. Here’s a quick tutorial on setting up beanstalk and using it in your Ruby or Rails application.
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beanstalk, distribution, message queue, Ruby
At work, we recently got all of our spec passing and determined that we needed to stay on top of keeping the test suite updated so that we knew that the quality of our product wasn’t compromised. To solve this, we implemented continuous integration with CruiseControl.rb.
Continuous Integration
The idea is to provide regular checks on the quality of your code. In our case, this means running the RSpec tests we’ve written for our Ruby on Rails application. Each time we commit to our git repository, CruiseControl connects to the repository and pulls down the latest code. It then runs all of our tests to let us know if anything has been broken in the latest commits. It provides a visible check to the entire team letting us know if someone committed broken code.
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Lately, I’ve been working on creating a podcast to help developers become better at their craft. The format will primarily be an interview with members of the Ruby and Rails communities on what they think make exceptional developers and about their contributions to the Ruby on Rails community.
My first interview will be with Gregg Pollack from Rails Envy and Ruby 5. I’d like to get some good questions both for Gregg and future interviewees, so I’ll give a license for Camtasia to the best two questions given by a Mac user and a Windows user. Please send the questions to chuck@charlesmaxwood.com letting me know if you’d like the Mac, Windows, or either version and your questions by Tuesday October 20, 2009. I’ll announce the winners on the first episode of the podcast.
I just read the article by Pratik Naik from the Rails Core Team regarding Rails Templates.
Have you ever wished you could start out your Rails application with all of your gems installed and all of your standard setup items completed? Well, wait no longer. You can now do it with Rails Templates. Pratik covered it pretty well, so I’m not going to repeat what he’s done. Rather, I’m going to share a template of my own and explain why I included what I did.
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action, annotate_models, authentication, controllers, create, cucumber, daemons, gems, generator, git, github, plugins, Pratik Naik, Rails, rails core, rake, rspec, rspec-rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails
One problem that seems to face people when they’re attempting to move their applications into production is the best way to manage deployment of their application. This is where tools like capistrano comes in.
Capistrano was written by Jamis Buck of 37signals. In a lot of ways it has become the defacto way to deploy Ruby on Rails applications. It has also had tools like webistrano build on top of it to provide a graphical interface to the command line tool.
To get started, you need to install the capistrano gem:
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authentication, capistrano, config, controllers, create, data, Database, deployment, git, github, passenger, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, server, webserver
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