Tom Purl’s Web Site

I spent most of my “hobby-time” this week “converting” my demo Ruby On Rails (RoR) application to Jruby.  I hope to have a post on all of my steps posted this week.

• Rails Powered by the GlassFish Application Server – Nice overview of RoR on top of the Glassfish J2EE server, but it’s a bit dated.
• Gnome 3 – A Quick Visual Tour – A few of my nerdy friends are pretty excited about this.  I’ve been using Gnome on-and-off for about 8 years now, and am pretty happy with it, so I hope the new revision doesn’t break any of my favorite features.
• Web Browser History – First, Early – This is a cool link courtesy of the Myths Of Innovation book by Scott Berkun.  I’m surprised by the total number, and that I had never heard of most of them.

I had lots of great opportunities to work with unfamiliar technologies last week, so I have an unusually large list of links in my tab sweep.

Solaris Zones

I learned late last week that Solaris Zones use different monitoring tools than any other Unix or Linux distribution, so I spent a good portion of this week learning about them.

• Monitoring Memory and Disk usage [Joyent Wiki] – This has some nice information on using prstat from within a Zone.
• The Joyent Community / How to check my zone size? – Another great post on Zones from the Joyent web sites. This article discusses the differences between RSS and SIZE/SWAP on Solaris.
• Slightly Skeptical View on Solaris Zones – This is a good, general overview of Solaris Zone technology.

RoR Deployment With Capistrano

I get the impression that a lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Capistrano, and I believe that I’m joining those ranks. When your recipe finally works, it works very well, but getting to that point can be very frustrating. Here are some links that helped me figure things out:

• Capistrano Home Page – This is a good starting point, but it’s lacking much advanced information.
• Streaming Capistrano — err.the_blog – A nice little tip if you want to monitor remote command-line streams using Capistrano.

Heroku + Toto

I discovered the Toto blogging “engine” this week, which led me to Heroku. It’s a very interesting deployment and hosting model for Ruby web applications, and I look forward to learning more about it.

• Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku – The title really says it all.
• My Toto Test Blog – An interesting test, but I don’t think that it will replace my WordPress blog any time soon.
• UsabilityPost – Blogging Simplified – A cool Toto blog with a great CSS stylesheet.

Rails Deployment: Production Configuration and Advanced Rails Tactics by Ezra Zygmuntowicz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Overall, this book had a lot of very good information, and it was very helpful to me as I deployed my first Ruby-On-Rails application into a “Production” environment.

Here’s the high points:

• Lots of good information on tools such as Capistrano, MySQL, Mongrel, Apache, and nginx.
• The authors clearly know what they are talking about.
• It’s helpful if you’re deploying a “toy” application (like I am) and if you’re deploying a large, clustered application.
• It doesn’t assume that you’re already an expert on either Web app deployment or Ruby-On-Rails.

Here are some of the things that could be better:

• This book was published over a year ago, and it already feels out-of-date. For example, there isn’t one mention of Phusion Passenger, even though this tool seems to be the new standard app server for Ruby-On-Rails in Production environments.
• This is very subjective, but I feel like the information could have been organized a little better. I felt as if the author jumped around a bit sometimes.
• Also, some of the passages were a little difficult to read due to their incorrect sentence structure. My writing isn’t perfect either, but I believe that the editor should have fixed more of these mistakes.

If you’re deploying a Ruby app in any setting, then this is a good book to get. I just don’t know if I would actually buy it.

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Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide by Dave Thomas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In general, this book does a fairly good job of helping you create a rails-based application. Part 3 includes some great in-depth information on the topics that are briefly discussed in Part 2.

I only have one real gripe about this book. It packs in lots of topics (e.g. db theory, AJAX, unit testing, security, deployment), but it doesn’t really tell you much about them. Therefore, if you have a problem, then good luck figuring it out using the content in the book.

A good example is the final chapter which covers deployment. The chapter devotes only a few small paragraphs to configuring Apache for passenger. To me, this section was completely useless unless you were already an expert with Apache configuration. I ended that chapter with a broken Apache server and no resources (from the book) to begin fixing it.

Another problem that I had with that chapter is that it really didn’t follow the pattern that the chapters in Part 2 used. In those chapters, the authors would should you how to do something relatively small, show you how to test it, and then provide some troubleshooting information if the task was particularly complex. The deployment chapter gave you a *very brief and generalized* tutorial in each section, and then just assumed that everything went perfectly. It didn’t show you how to test anything, and it didn’t help you troubleshoot any possible problems.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that no book will provide all of the information that I would ever need about a subject, and thank goodness for the internet in these situations. I was just hoping that all of the chapters in a book that I actually bought would provide better information than some person’s blog.

So in general, I guess I would have to say that this was a very good book with some bad chapters that were tacked-on at the end.

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