Posted in Heartbeat, Hosting, Ruby on Rails, Slingshot 
Comments
CBQ
It’s tough finding a developer who doesn’t like Ruby on Rails. However, it’s also easy finding developers who think “Rails Deployment” is the next release of a horror movie series.
We’ve developed exclusively in Rails over the past 1.5 years, and a major piece missing from our development process was a simple system for deploying, managing, and monitoring our client applications.
Enter Heartbeat and one-click Capistrano deployment. With Heartbeat, you can run any of your applications’ Capistrano recipes and Rake tasks on a remote system from a single web page.
Watch Heartbeat deploy a Rails application [MOV | 6.9 MB]
Born on RailsDay 2006, Heartbeat is helping us overcome the most difficult part of the Rails life cycle. In a couple of weeks, we hope it will do the same for you.
Comments
Derek
Using a subdomain as an account key (ie – highgroove.heartbeathq.com where “highgroove” is the account key) is a great way to personalize a web application. Rails has a nifty plugin written just for this, but the implementation information is a bit scattered. Here’s a step-by-step guide for implementing, testing, and simulating this powerful feature.
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Comments
CBQ
Highgroove Studios, along with the Atlanta Ruby User Group, the Birmingham Ruby User Group, and several other organizations, is happy to announce that planning and organizing for the Southeast Ruby Conference is underway.
Our first official planning meeting will be held at the September Atlanta Ruby User Group meeting, on September 5, 2006.
With the excitement and pledging of support so far, this is shaping up to be a standout conference.
If you are interested in planning, sponsoring, or just pledging support, contact me (Charles Brian Quinn).
Posted in What We Wrote Comments
James
I’ll be fair with you and tell you right out that I am biased in this matter, but I still have to say:
GO BUY THE RUBY COOKBOOK RIGHT NOW!!!
Yes, I wrote six of the bazillion recipies in the book (on DRb and Rinda), but I do not make money when they sell copies, so you can trust what I am saying here.
Basically we are talking about nearly 1,000 pages of EVERYTHING on Ruby. I don’t care who you are or what you do with Ruby these guys wrote something about your problems. How cool is that?
These recipes are just loaded with code, tips, links to related resources, etc. They even manage to be funny in places. (You will laugh at the dinosaur ad.)
Why are you still reading this?! Get up. Go outside. Hail a cab. Get yourself to a bookstore and pick this up! GO!
(If you have back problems you shoudn’t be carrying books this big, trust me. Instead you can grab the PDF version O’Reilly just made available.)
Posted in Community, Ruby on Rails Comments
James
There are countless links out there that will bury you in suggestions for how to write Rails code, so I’m going to take the road less travelled and give you three non-code tips that I think are really important.
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Comments
Derek
Microsoft has declared victory over J2EE, and is now setting their sites on Ruby on Rails.
I think I’ve got a case of Deja Vu.
Posted in Salesforce, HowTo, Ruby on Rails Comments
Derek
Salesforce, the large Customer Relationship Management tool, and Ruby on Rails, the elegant web development framework, seem like an awkward pair. About as awkward as dipping a Wendy’s french fry in a frosty.
Salesforce is large, often times confusing, and is a tool built for handling lots of different jobs. Rails is lean, elegant, and designed specifically for making web development easier. While Salesforce and Rails are dramatically different, they actually work very well together (much like a Wendy’s french fry dipped in a frosty – trust me).
This unlikely pairing is sparked by ActiveSalesforce, a Ruby on Rails connection adapter to Salesforce-managed data. This Ruby Gem makes working with Salesforce data about as easy as the Rails-MySQL combination.
Highgroove Studios is working on a Salesforce-Rails application, and one of the things we have to do is synchronize a local MySQL database with Salesforce. This is needed because the connection to Salesforce is slower than when working with a local database, and several parts of the application are time-sensitive.
Here’s a look at how we designed the application to synchronize data between the local database and Salesforce.
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Posted in Community Comments
James
About half of the geeks of the world prefer newsgroups for communication and the other half swears by mailing lists. (A tiny percentage prefer web forum or pigeon, but clearly these people suffer from insanity.) The Ruby community has long had both: the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and the Ruby-Talk mailing list.
In 2001, a band of clever adventurers and Rubyists united the two communities with heroic feats of hacking. A “gateway” script was installed that dutifully ferried all messages from one group to the other and visa versa. This was a blessing, because both sides now shared the collective Ruby knowledge. A golden age began.
Unfortunately, a few months back, the evil server hosting monster struck and slew the gateway with a single stoke! (In all fairness, the hosting provided to the gateway over the last five years was more than generous, but that just doesn’t make for as good a story and I’m telling this one!) The golden age ended, the community shattered into two halves…
At HighGroove, we couldn’t stand for that.
Knowing the peril involved, I enlisted the help of the brave HighGroove SysWizard Charles and we went in search of a gateway in need of rescue. It was a long journey and we suffered a minor defeat along the way, but good always triumphs over evil and we cannot be stopped easily!
I’m happy to bring the good news to all the peoples of the Ruby kingdom: the gateway has been resurrected. The golden age has come again.
Please join me thanking all those patrons who sponsored our quest:
- Dave Thomas, First Knight of Ruby, penned the original gateway code and it only needed minor updates even a squire like me could figure out to restore it to its former glory.
- Dennis Oelkers, former Guardian of the Gateway, helped us locate the script-in-distress and taught us much about the care and feeding of such a creature.
- Fred Senault, James’s new best friend by sworn oath, generously gave the gateway the life giving kiss: a newsgroup account.
- The afore mentioned SysWizard Charles, who can quite literally conjure servers to host gateways with the snap of his fingers. His powers are beyond compare.
Thanks to these brave men, the knowledge is again shared by all! Use it wisely my fellow adventurers…
Comments
Derek
Realizing that hitting “talk” on my phone dialed the previous number. Figuring out that the arrow next to my fuel gauge showed which side the car fuel door is on. Tab completion.
A couple of times a month, I’ll have a “wow – that’s so useful and so simple” moment. One of the first times I experienced that with Ruby was with #method_missing.
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Posted in HowTo, Ruby on Rails Comments
Derek
Metaprogramming is your secret identical twin that likes doing all of the things you don’t. Need to take out the trash? Just tell your twin. Need to program in Java? Send your twin an email.
Metaprogramming, defined as writing code that writes code by Why The Lucky Stiff, makes scaffolding, associations, validations, and the many magical parts of Rails possible. Implementing metaprogramming techniques can drastically eliminate duplicate code, making your applications far easier to maintain and build. It also lets your code do the work – not you.
CampusSync.com, a client project of ours, is a collaboration site for college students. It has several administration areas that are almost identical, but not a good fit for Rail’s standard scaffolding. The solution to eliminating duplicate code: roll our own metaprogramming solution.
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