Life is grand

The second and final day of RailsConf Europe 2006 starts.

Jim Weirich, author of Rake, starts an interesting talk on the inherent dangers of the dynamic nature of Ruby. 3rd party libraries you may use that, instead of sub-classing, open and change standard Ruby libraries e.g. Logger.

And now we are moving on to the famous Leroy World of Warcraft video. It illustrates collborative systems and how they can go wrong.

So, tips for safe Ruby programming:

• Use namespaces (class Node for instance occurs 9 times, good thing all but 1 are namespaced.)
• Choose a good project name (not generic, checkout Rubyforge, RAA and gems first for conflict.)
• Avoid top level constants and functions (e.g. Rake is a bad example. Jim wrote Rake.)
• Try not to modify existing classes or at least add behaviour rather than modify.
• He recommends prefixing existing class modifications with your project name. I can’t say I agree, this is ugly and non-intuitive.
• Sometimes you should take risky steps to reap productivity advantages.
• You can wrap method definitions in a conditional block. Jim uses this to check if a method exists before he adds his own. Got to love Ruby.
• Forthcoming selector namespaces should help Ruby a good deal.
• Careful with cool tricks e.g. adapting to old calls with const_missing.
• Limit the scope of your changes as much as possible.
• Preserve the original behaviour as much as possible. This ties into Design by Contract. Feel free to improve internal code but don’t break the contract.

The conclusion though is that Ruby shouldn’t be crippled to protect against the ignorant. Very good talk, thanks Jim.

Why just arrived and will gives his talk in a few minutes. See you then.

(slides)
Thomas is the author of script.aculo.us so he knows a little bit about JavaScript.

Script.aculo.us has a unit testing framework plugin for Rails (javascript_test plugin.) Outputs nice views. All the usual assertions and some simple benchmarking. Comes with a generator to get you up and running fast. Running multiple tests is done via rake and with multiple browsers, nice. No code coverage metrics. RJS not supported either.

He recommends good old FireBug for JS debugging. Hurrah. Venkman is still useful though thanks to its profiling feature he mentions. Webkit and Drosera for Safari and Microsoft Script Debugger for Internet Explorer.

A very boring speaker but he knows his stuff.

At the evening Q&A session now. You know we are amongst geeks when an evening session is fully attended. See you all in the morning.

And into Jason Hoffman’s talk on systems administration and Rails. Deployment, hosting, power, databases etc.

Strongspace, a Rails app from Joyent, is at 60terabytes. Joyent does TextDrive remember so they know some things. BTW Jason is from Joyent.

Rails is just a small part of your entire system. You need a lot more than just a sorted Rails config to have a well served app.

Virtualisation is the real only way. Xen, VMWare (if you must) or Solaris Zones.

Jason is not enamoured with Linux; “If I could turn Linux into a clever way of saying ‘crashes everyday and doesn’t tell you why’, I would.”

WordPress, half a million users, uses DNS load balancing. Works pretty well.

Joyent chooses:
- Console is Lantronix
- Sun Fire AMD servers, T1000, X4100 etc.
- Opteron 285 and TI SPARC
- 2GB RAM
- Sen Fire X5400 storage
- 500GB SATA discs
- Solaris Nevada OS
- Gigabit with cat6 cables

DTrace is getting Ruby integration so you can write performance tests to find out what exactly is going wrong. DTrace is from Solaris and also ported to Mac OS X in Leopard via XRay in XCode.

Key concepts:
- virtualise
- seperate hardware comp. (db from procesing from storage)
- KISS
- stoichiometry (from chemistry, the practice of adding up. If you can’t just add on another server then you have problems.)
- config management and distributed control
- pool and split i.e. SOA
- Understand what is maximum to understand what should be happening vs. what is (potential)

I’ve asked Jason for the slides to this talk and will post them later.

Excellent talk from Jason.
- DNS and federation

Three talks in and it is going fairly well. Soren Burkhart talk was billed as how they used Rails to revolutionise the airline industry. Untortunatley he spent too much time on the preliminaries and had to rush through the meat of his talk (the app and its development.) It looked interesting but we didn’t get into much detail. Might be worth contacting him directly to get some info.

James Cox’s talk on Rails performance and scaling (pdf) was pretty good. A chunk of my notes from it:

- columns => :select, pagination => :limit, :offset)
- @var ||= query
- MySQL is decent
- Memcache (doesn’t have to be on the same machine)
- mysql \s
- mysql - log slow queries - mysql_slow_queries
- nginx (russian but fast)
- mongrel for scaling even if it isn’t the fastest
- hostname lookup in apache2 bad

Matt Kent and Kyle Shank gave a demo of his RadRails IDE which seems to have come a long way from what I initially used. Auto-completion they want to do but apparently is a difficult feature.They are also working on porting TextMate Ruby snippets to RadRails. Certainly more featurefull than RIDE-ME at this stage. Autotest is a nifty way to run certain (or all) tests in the background on an interval or on save.

So far every talker has been young and inexperienced. Really smart but these aren’t slick conference speakers like you get at Java and Microsoft events. This is a good and bad thing. Good as you get low level info, bad because they can wander and be unprepared for the talk.

At RailsConf Europe 2006. Good turn out and location.

David’s keynote was very technical. He mentioned a revamping of the views (codenamed simply helpful, currently a plugin) and how ActiveResource probably won’t be in Rails 2.0.

Kathy Sierra’s talk was really good. All about passion and emotion in our products. Talk to the brain, not the mind i.e. go for the caveman in all of us rather than our abstracted logical sides. To a degree of course.

I just booked my place at the European Ruby on Rails conference being held on the 14th and 15th of September in London. If you are going drop me a line.

Tom Corcoran contacted me yesterday and mentioned that he’d be happy to offer the TSSG or WIT facilities as a venue for BarCamp Ireland.

I work at the TSSG building and it is a lovely location with a great boardroom and other meeting rooms. WIT is also a good venue.

I have updated the BarCamp page but thought I’d mention it here too so that it is noticed.

“Welcome to the O’Reilly… I mean it@cork Web 2.0 Conference” is how Tom Raftery began the it@cork Web 2.0 Conference this past Thursday. After all the buzz about O’Reilly vs. it@cork this was thankfully one of only few mentions during the conference.

The conference was pitched at a high-level with more of a business and marketing bent than technical development. Some good points were made and I met some of the people behind Irish Web 2.0 (including Bernie of IrishEyes.) Also had a talk with Salim Ismail (formerly of PubSub), Walter Higgins (Sxoop) and the ever friendly Robert Burke (Microsoft.) I also got to meet a very good friend from the U.K for the first time. Thanks for the drinks Derek. On that note I have to recommend Preachers pub in Cork city. Great music, very friendly barstaff and the craic. However I wouldn’t recommend the Jägermeister and Apple Sourz shot combination. Hoo boy.

Argolon has done an excellent job reviewing the conference with posts for each talk. it@cork have also put up the files from each presentation.

Some points that interested me:

• Shel Israel quoted Technorati’s blog count figure (40mil) and Salim quickly countered that PubSub has counted closer to 100mil. One must also not forget the huge numbers blogging in Korea and China.
• Shel mentioned that Wells Fargo and C|Net had both invited him to give internal talks on blogging. This was to do with blogging behind the firewall.
• Shel pointed out that blogging is allowing customers to see that they can trust and like the “lower echelons” of companies even if they aren’t charmed by the upper echelons. e.g. Robert Scoble and others bringing a human face to the “Evil Empire” aka Microsoft.

• eBay auctions last on average 7 days

  which is too fast for Google to index. New breed of search engines required according to Salim.

• The “hidden web” (or dark data/net) is massive (400 times bigger than the public web) and is the next step for the web (Salim). Unlock databases, expose them to the web.
• From a show of hands in the room nearly everyone was using a feed reader.
• Salim thinks we are into Internet 3.0 and it revolves around events (watching as opposed to searching.) Apparently the PubSub engine (which is not database driven) can handle millions of events a second.
• Every company has an email server now. The next common server product will be the “event server” according to Salim.
• Nooked.com are using Google Analytics for their stats according to Fergus Burns.
• Walter Higgins is using Perl for his PXN8 product. He reckons that language/technology choice is much less of a factor these days.

All in all a good conference and I look forward to more progress from the Web 2.0 community in Ireland.

I am off to the it@cork Web 2.0 Conference today and then onto the Ring of Kerry for a three day weekend starting tomorrow. I should be able to post something about the conference this evening but will be offline from then on.

Have a great weekend all and enjoy the great Irish weather we are having.

Are any of the lads attending the it@cork Web 2.0 Conference planning on having drinks or dinner afterwards? I have a friend coming in from the U.K. for the conference and night plus a few chaps from here in The TSSG. It would be good to get together for a bite after.