Server-Side Magazine

As you may have heard or seen, ActiveRecord 3.1 now comes with prepared statement support. This happens for you automatically since ActiveRecord will associate all SQL statements with bind substitute variables. The implementation of these is left to each database adapter. [...]

As the current production version of Ruby, a boost for Ruby 1.9.2-p180 should benefit most of you so I knew I had to share Todd’s work as soon as I’d given it a test run. I ran the same benchmarks [...]

Xavier Shay is an Australian Rubyist who shares an issue with most of us: slow loading Rails 3 apps on Ruby 1.9.2! Unlike most of us, he put together a solution for ruby-head (what I’m calling 1.9.3 but isn’t technically*) that, in my own tests, slashed 37% off the boot time of my Rails 3.0 app. He shared his work just a week ago. Awesome! But some other developments have occurred since [...]

One of the reasons people used to give for using MySQL over PostgreSQL (just ‘Postgres’ from here on in) was that Postgres was considered hard to install. It’s a shame, because it’s a great database (I’ve been using it for personal and some work projects for years, like my current side project, sendcat). Luckily it’s now really simple to get it going on your Mac to give it a try. This is how you do it. [...]

This video details the use of Ruby, EventMachine, RabbitMQ, and various distributed systems techniques in the building of the VMforce large scale cloud system at VMware. Topics covered will be the cloud system architecture, asynchronous programming in Ruby, EventMachine, Sinatra, and the use of messaging in a complex distributed system. [...]

There is a big change to the handling of assets in Rails 3.1 compared to previous versions called the asset pipeline and this can have an effect on your production deployments, more so than any previous Rails update I can remember. Here is a list of the gotchas I came across and how to fix them. [...]

In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative. [...]

Data storage does not always need a complete SQL RDBMS like PostgreSQL. In fact, sometimes small is beautiful, and plain text data formats can be even easier to use with the right libraries. [...]

At Engine Yard we have always adhered to a strong belief that open, community-based innovation and standards are the future of computing. We created our platform around Ruby and Rails not just because of their substantial technical merits and open source roots, but also because of the vibrant community surrounding them. Our entire stack is open source, and where standards exist we adopt them. We are laser-focused on providing the best Platform-as-a-Service out there, runnable on multiple infrastructures and supporting the options our customers demand.

Model, View, Controller. If you’ve ever tried Ruby on Rails, those words have probably been drilled into your head a thousand times over. On the other hand, if this is new to you, there’s plenty of resources on Nettuts+ for beginners – but this is not one of them. [...]

RailsConf 2011, David Heinemeier Hansson [...]

Next month, Engine Yard University and thoughtbot are launching Rails AntiPatterns training, an instructor led course based on the book by Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh. The course is for Rails programmers who want to identify, address and discuss some common Rails development pitfalls. It is an advanced class, and assumes at least a few months of Rails programming experience. [...]

Functional Programming (FP) has become popular as the most robust way to write concurrent applications. Functional ideas improve code in other ways, like reducing coupling between [...]

Today we’re starting a new section on Server-Side Magazine called 10 Questions where we interview influential people in various web dev. fields.

Our first interview is with David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and partner at 37signals.

For those of us used to the plush comfort of Ruby land, dropping down to C is a scary prospect. The spectre of segfaults haunts the boundary, forcing unprepared travellers to turn back at the first glimpse of a semi-colon. Thankfully, Xavier is here to guide us into the murky depths with his latest episode of Code Safari [...]

If you’ve ever pondered the Ruby standard exceptions, you probably realize they can be pretty readily implemented as pure Ruby. While YARV implements the basic exceptions in C, they make sure to us [...]

In this week’s episode of Code Safari, Xavier digs into the ‘nanoc’ gem and uses ‘Lingua’ to analyse the readability of his writing. [...]

WebSockets are one of the most underappreciated innovations in HTML5. Unlike local storage, canvas, web workers, or even video playback, the benefits of the WebSocket API are not immediately apparent to the end user. [...]

Ruby on Rails is an excellent framework for building web applications. Perhaps the best. But it’s not currently very well suited to what I call web sites.

The difference is simple. In a web site, the unique business value comes from the content creators (authors, bloggers, photographers, etc). [...]

Ruby is a one of the most popular languages used on the web. We’ve started a new Session here on Nettuts+ that will introduce you to Ruby, as well as the great frameworks and tools that go along with Ruby development. In this lesson, we’ll look at using regular expression in Ruby. [...]

When we talk about Dynamic Languages, it means different things to different people. Is a language dynamic because of dynamic typing?. is it because it can execute scripts of arbitrary code dynamically? [...]

Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matsumoto Yukihiro, a.k.a. Matz, born 14 April 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. [...]

Rubyists seeking to move processing to the background have long relied on projects like Delayed Job and Resque. Now, Ivan Vanderbyl offers another option. Cloudist is powered by AMQP and EventMachine and aims to provide a simple yet highly scalable job queue for Ruby apps [...]

One of the things that always made me shudder in PHP was the lack of being able to implement generic class mixins in an easy way. The ability to avoid writing code multiple times is important to me as a developer, as it makes me more efficient at my job, so I can do more important code in the same amount of time [...]

During the week I had a problem: given a list of possible URLs, which ones are real? Seemed like a perfect job for a computer to solve. I reached into my Ruby toolbox, and found a couple of neat tricks along the way. In this week’s code safari we’ll be doing something slightly different—rather than investigating a popular gem, we will be discovering the Ruby standard library itself. [...]