JRuby on Rails with GoldSpike – Scaling for more users
The default configuration for running JRuby on Rails using GoldSpike only allows 4 instances of the JRuby runtime. This means that if there are more than 4 simultaneous requests from clients, the web...
View ArticleWedding Registries for the Pommies
Your Wedding Presents now shows all money amounts in pounds, if you say you are from the United Kingdom. God Save the Queen!
View ArticleHosting at Rails Playground, a review
I've been meaning to write about Rails Playground for a while. I currently use their level 2 developer hosting and I've been very happy with it. I host several domains and subdomains on my account. I...
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Automating MySQL Database Backups
Great, so you've got your web application up and running on some server somewhere, and thousands of users are hard at work entering their valuable data into your application, and thence to a MySQL...
View ArticlePractical JRuby on Rails (Web 2.0 Projects) by Ola Bini
The fine folk at Apress sent me a copy of Ola Bini's new book to review. The full title is "Practical JRuby on Rails Web 2.0 Projects - Bringing Ruby On Rails to the Java Platform". Overall, it was a...
View Article“JRuby: Enterprise 2.0″ Presentations
Josh Price and I will be co-presenting at the Melbourne Sun Tech Day and the Sydney ACS Web Technologies SIG. Here's the low down: JRuby: Enterprise 2.0 There's a lot of buzz around JRuby in both the...
View Article“JRuby: Enterprise 2.0″ Slides
Here's the slides from “JRuby: Enterprise 2.0″ from our recent talks at Sun Tech Day and the ACS Web Technologies SIG.
View ArticleSydney BarCamp 3 this Weekend!
BarCamp Sydney is two days long this year, and will span the whole of the coming weekend (5-6 April). I'll be there on Saturday. It's usually quite a fun event, lots of good sessions and you're quite...
View ArticleLoan Calulator: Monthly repayment and interest breakdown
Wondering if your loan repayment calculations have been performed correctly this month, taking into account interest rate rises and extra repayments? You might be interested in giving my monthly loan...
View ArticleRiskAssess – Risk Assessments for Schools
In my spare time, I've been developing RiskAssess, an online risk assessment system for schools. RiskAssess helps teachers and lab assistants to quickly and easily produce risk assessments for...
View ArticleMigrating Mephisto Plugins to Drax 0.8
There have been some major changes to Mephisto in the latest release (0.8 Drax) that break existing plugins. If you're interested in migrating your existing plugin(s) over to Drax, read on. Repository...
View ArticleContact Form For Mephisto updated for Drax 0.8
Mephisto Drax (version 0.8) introduces breaking changes for plugins. I've just finished updating the contact / feedback form plugin. It's now working fine and tests passing. Installation instructions...
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Vim with find file for Rails (like TextMate)
In a fit of TextMate jealousy, several months ago, I scoured the web for a way to get find-file functionality info my favourite Ruby/Rails editor, vim. I was very happy to find that Jamis Buck had...
View ArticleLinux VirtualBox vs Windows for Rails Dev
So yes, everyone has heard that Mac OS X and TextMate is the epitome of Rails development, and that it is so awesome that it brings tears of joy to developers eyes, &c. However, for those of us who...
View ArticleReview: “Deploying Rails Applications” by Ezra Zygmuntowicz et al.
Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate and Clinton Begin is a good read, if a little dated. It was published in May 2008, and you can see that things have...
View ArticleSpying on Instance Variables in Ruby
A little while back, a few colleagues and I were spiking a proxy concept based on extending an existing web server. We wanted to check out an instance variable (eg, @very_secret) in a framework object...
View ArticleMephisto Contact Form Plugin Moved to GitHub
Sorry the the confusion, anyone who has been checking out the the Mephisto Contact Form Plugin from the old SVN repository. The latest version with an update for Rails 2.3 is at:...
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“Ruby for Rails” by David Black
Ruby for Rails by David Black is a fun read that takes concentration but repays it with little epiphanies that explain syntax and language features that you had previously taken for granted. The book...
View ArticleHTML to PDF Conversion Plugin For Rails (A fork of wicked pdf)
Once a business web application reaches a certain size, the need often arises to generate PDFs from HTML/CSS. Up until recently, the story around this for a MRI Rails application was not good. You...
View ArticleMonitoring MySQL Slave Replication Status with Ruby and Cron
When offering higher levels of uptime on a web site backed by MySQL, a good approach is to set up a MySQL master-slave configuration for failover between servers. This generally works quite well, but...
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