RailsConf 2007 - Day 1

Daniel Wanja — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:04:00 +0000

Here we go, RailsConf 2007, has started. It’s bigger than ever, more tracks, more sessions. This is the first day where they provide full or half-day tutorials sessions. I will try to cover the different sessions I will attend so stay tuned.

Today I will attend: “Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up.” and “Harnessing Capistrano.”

Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up. by Jason Hoffman

Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent. Did also form Textdrive.

Six part presentation:

I. Introduction and foundation II. Where do I put stuff III. What stuff? IV. What do I run on this tuf? V. What are the patterns of deployment? VI. Lessons learned

His presentation will answer the following questions:

What is a “scalalble” application?
What are some hardware layout?
Where do you get the hardware?
How do you pay for it?
Where do you put?
Who runs it?
How do you watch it?
What do you need relative to an application?
What are the commonalities of scalable web architectures?
What are the unique bottlenecks for Ruby on Rails applications?
What’s the best way to start so you make sure everything scales?
what are to common mistakes?

Maybe it’s a little early, or I am not awake, but the talk seems a little slow. But Jason seems to do a good job at describing how the different people (developer, sysadmin, ...) see scalability.

Ease of management is on log scale. It’s not just a Rails issue. A $5000 Dell 1850 costs $1850 to power over 3 year.

This is a really good presentation from a point of view of what is involved to build data center. I should have read better the description of the presentation.

So I am going to move over to Thomas Fuchs presentation:

Is JavaScript Overrated? Or: How I Stopped Worrying and Put Prototype and script.aculo.us to Full Use by Thomas Fuchs

I am just tuning in to his presentation and he is showing of how to use selectors with Prototype.

DOM traversal:

$('blech').previous('ul').down('.somesuch',2)
$('homo-sapiens').descendantOf('australopothecus')

Element methods:

$('a_div').update('blah').show().setStyle({opacity:0.5});
$('myform').focusFirstElement();
$('person-example').serialize();
Element.addMethods('form') {
  valid: function(element) {
       // code to valid form
  }
}

What’s new in Prototype 1.5.1:

speedier $$
CSS 3 Selectors
$(‘form’).request()
String .includes .times .toPaddedString(8,2)
JSON support i.e. new Date().toJSON();
$(‘blah’).firstDescendent()
throw $continue deprecated use “return” instead
Safari issues fixed
YAML compatible

DOM, Events, Forms, Position:

new Element(tagName, attributes);
$(‘blech’).insert(html|object, position)
$(‘blech’).wrap(‘span’);
$(‘country’).setValue(‘AT’);

Function.prototype: curry(), wrap(), defer(), delay() Q: When is the next release of Prototype? A: When it’s ready.

A 10 minute break now, the Thomas is going to present Scriptaculous Effects.

script.aculo.us adds advanced User Interface interaction to the DOM. Extracted from Real-World applications. Started with Fluxiom. The two main parts are Visual effects and Drag&Drop. Today we will only look at the Visual Effects. They are other parts such as Autocompleter, In-Place Editor, Slider control, DOM Builder, and Unit testing. They won’t be more advanced components.

Effects engine: the ideas behind the engine is timeline based animations.

Core Effects:

Effect.Move
Effect.Opacity
Effect.Highlight
Effect.ScrollTo
Effect.Morph // 1.7+
Effect.Parallel

Based on the Effect.Base.prototype class. Effect life cycle: intialize(), setup(), update(), finish(). Each frame calls update().

Effect.DefaultOptions = {
    transition: Effect.Transitions.sinoidal,
    duration: 1.0,
    fps: 100,
    sync: false,
    from: 0.0,
    to: 1.0,
    delay: 0.0,
    queue: 'parallel'
}

Morphing: came out with Scriptaculous 1.7.

$('mydiv').morph('font-size:20px; color:"#abcdef");
$('mydiv').morph('warning'); //limited to top level classname

TimeLines:

new Effect.Blah('element_2')
new Effect.Blah('element_2', {duration:0.6, delay:0.3});

You have to be careful with effects created that will run in parallel as the javascript engine are not multi-thread. Better solutions is to use queues:

new Effect.Blah('element_1', {queue:'end'});
new Effect.Blah('element_2', {queue:'front'});

and use scope:

new Effect.Blah('element_1', {queue:{scope:'blech'}});
new Effect.Blah('element_2', {queue:{scope:'blech', position:'end'}});
new Effect.Blah('element_3', {queue:'front'});

Utilities:

Element.toggle('element', 'blind');
Element.tagifyText(element);
Element.multiple('element', Effect.Fade, {speed:0.05});

Do it yourself: Thomas now shows how to create an Effect programatically.

Future features:

Sound without Flash (it’s already in the beta release). Sound.paly(‘sword.mp3’). It uses native sound implementation with Quicktime as fallback.
Adjust to new Prototype features. $(‘blech’).fade(); $(‘blech’).slowlyReveal();

Part IV: Testing

Thomas is flying through testing…

assert(true)
assertEqual(expected, actual)
assertEnumEqual(expected, actual)
assertNotEqual(expected, actual)
assertMatch
assertIdentical
assertNotIdentical
assertType
assertRaise
assertRespondTo
assertVisible(element)
assertNotVisible(element)
info(message)

Mostly unit testing, but some functional testing is available. Most assert take a message. I.e. assertXYZ(params, message)

wait(milliseconds, method) // should be last statement in test, but can be nested.
rake test:javascripts (browser will popup). Done with the javascript_test plugin. Launches the web server (WEBrick), then controls the browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE), the browser then calls the web server, and list the results (SUCCESS, FAILURE, and ERROR)

Resources:

JRuby talk by Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo

(note taken by Robert Hall, thanks man!)

1.8ish—based on Ruby 1.8.5
Gems 0.9.1 is pre-installed
Partially compiled—about 80% of Ruby code compiles…rest is run in JIT mode
Ruby 1.8 strings supported. Works with ActiveSupport::MultiByte
Ruby 2.0 String support coming
Most Ruby apps should work on JRuby —most gems just work —Red Cloth, Blue Cloth —Hpricot
Typical Rails commands just work
ports: Mongrel ported, Hpricot ported, RMajick in progress
Ruby thread API supported —native-threaded 1 JRuby thread=1 system thread —supports thread pooling
performance comparable to C Ruby impl —Rdoc has issues —CLI performance slow
JDBC support strong —mySQL support strong —some postgres issues —some Oracle users —many others
ActiveRecord JDBC
No native extension support
Goldspike—JRuby deployment tool —Rails plugin for building WAR files —app server agnostic —Can be deployed to Java app server as WAR file
Deployment—MOngrel supported..some issues (forking, process management doesn’t work)
Access to Java EE features (JMS, JPA, JTA)
Java libraries can be wrapped
Coming soon —A Grizzly/GlassFish V3 option —Lightweight, gem-installable like Mongrel —Concurrency, pooling mulit-app like WAR
Mephisto demo
Main idea—- Ruby as the programming language, Java for the platform and libraries
Best of all worlds —Ruby or Rails as the appl layer —Java libraries alone or as ported/wrapped gems ~~-Java based services~~-legacy app integration —The JVM
Acceptable to today’s enterprise —Java to ‘them’, Ruby to you
Calling Java from Rails demo —RSS reader demo..calling Java library from Rails code
Tools— Textmate, Emacs, Vi(m), notepad —missing some features —code competion? —jump to declaration? —rename variables? —popup Rdoc?
Presenters claim Best Ruby IDE Available is NetBeans (milestone 9) —code completion —smart syntax highlightings (for Ruby code, RHTML files, etc) —Rdoc support
Demoed a cool Ruby shell like IRB implemented in Swing..built into NetBeans
Jruby 1.0 almost ready

LUNCH: will be back at 1:30pm

Harnessing Capistrano by Jamis Buck

Jamis will focus Capistrano 2.0 today. Some things will not be backward compatible with Capistrano 1.0.

His slides are online at http://presentations.jamisbuck.org/railsconf2007/.

"RailsConf 2007 - Day 1" by Dan Kubb

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:54:43 +0000

It doesn’t look like $(element).setValue(value) was added in Prototype 1.5.1. It’s in the form branch, but its not in the trunk yet.

When its ready it’ll allow you to set an form field’s value without needing to care if its an input, select, or textarea element.

"RailsConf 2007 - Day 1" by Vish

Sat, 19 May 2007 15:04:46 +0000

I missed Railsconf 2007 so I am living vicariously thru this blog. Tell us about the weather in Portland. I want to move there. Can’t you attend all sessions concurrently?

Thanks

"RailsConf 2007 - Day 1" by Fiber

Thu, 17 May 2007 16:54:06 +0000

At last! I hope you will track all events, because I couldn’t visit conference this time :(

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