As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Rails 2.1 natively supports incoming JSON requests. Unfortunately, it still struggles with JSON data containing non-ASCII characters.
According to the JSON spec, JSON fully supports UTF-8 encoded text, so with a few exceptions it generally should not be necessary to escape non-ASCII characters with \u Unicode escape sequences. [...]
I realized that it’s been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing…
Anyway, I figure I’ll try to get back into the habit of publishing smaller posts, but [...]
I’ve been meaning to set up a network monitoring tool at work for a while. We have a couple of different applications using various technologies (currently mainly Ruby on Rails and PHP), running on various VPS servers. While we are using Monit to keep an eye on our Rails apps and restart them if necessary, [...]
According to this blog post and several mentions on Twitter, Phusion announced today’s release of Passenger (aka mod_rails) 2.0 at RailsConf. Apparently, Passenger 2.0 will be Rack compliant and thus support not only Rails, but any Rack compatible web framework, including Merb and Sinatra. Interestingly, Passenger will not even be limited to Ruby any more [...]
Earlier this week, we tried to figure out the cleanest and easiest way to get our Rails app to accept incoming JSON requests. Up until recently, developers were able to use various Rails plugins for this purpose, such as the json_request plugin.
Luckily, it turns out that full support for JSON was added to Rails in [...]
A couple weeks ago, Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails) was released. I recently tested this at work, on an EC2 instance, and my initial experience was so smooth that I am already planning to use it to deploy our various Rails applications. The benchmarks I’ve seen put its performance on approximately the same level as a [...]
Earlier today, TechCrunch’s poorly researched claim that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails in favor of PHP or Java generated a lot of buzz in the Twitter and Ruby communities (the claim was later refuted by Twitter developer Evan Williams).
Of course, the article’s comments attracted the usual, ignorant TechCrunch trolls. Most took the opportunity to [...]
I just got back from an ice cream social with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH). I had come across his blog post about this casual event last week and figured I’d make my way over there, particularly since the location (Michael’s Gelato & Cafe) in downtown Palo Alto is only 5 [...]
The distributed Git version control system has been gaining a lot of traction lately. In contrast to traditional, centralized version control systems like CVS or Subversion, Git enables developers to easily fork each other’s repositories, pull patches from each other, etc. Even though I have not had a chance to use Git beyond pulling down [...]
This morning, Apple finally announced details about the long-awaited iPhone SDK. The SDK is available for download starting today, and it sounds pretty intriguing!
It comes with a full application stack that includes a custom version of Cocoa (Cocoa Touch), and APIs to access all the iPhone specific features, including hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, the accelerometer, camera, [...]
Today, I attended a tech talk by ThoughtWorks’ Ola Bini on JRuby (JRuby Wikipedia entry here).
I keep hearing great things about JRuby (even Matz has good things to say about it), and it’s nice to hear this from the horse’s mouth as well (Ola is one of the JRuby core developers). Apparently the latest version [...]
I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka “Matz”) on Ruby 1.9 today. I had heard that he is a very nice guy, and he definitely came across as very charismatic. He is not particularly fluid in English, and in previous interviews I had heard with him, he often used an [...]
Heroku recently announced a public beta. Heroku is a Rails hosting service with a twist: They offer a fully integrated development and hosting environment. You develop your application using a web based IDE, and it gets automatically deployed to Amazon EC2.
The IDE works surprisingly well. You get a typical file browser that allows you to [...]
Merb 0.9.0 was released 5 days ago. It looks like the download instructions on the homepage have also been updated for 0.9.0. You can now install it as a gem or from source, by checking out the code from the Merb Git repository.
Aside from a more modular design, Merb 0.9 also introduces a more flexible [...]
Earlier today, Alex Payne blogged about side projects, which prompted me to write down my own thoughts on this matter, as I had been planning a blog post on this subject for a while. Alex states some of the benefits of having a side project, such as keeping you learning, dealing with different types of [...]
So where was I? Ah yes, in yesterday’s post I left off with me going back to Ruby for my personal projects.
My standard choice for web development has been Ruby on Rails for a while now (although I haven’t had a chance to try Rails 2.0 yet). However, lately I’ve been playing with Merb. Merb [...]
It’s been a while since I last blogged about any technologies I’ve been playing with, so I figured I’m due for an update. I am going to split this into a two-part series: First I will play catch up and talk about the technologies that I’ve played with over the past 6 months or so. [...]
For the past 8-9 years, Java has been my bread-and-butter programming language, and to this date it is the language I am most familiar with. However, for the past few years I have developed a growing interest in dynamic scripting languages, and Ruby in particular. To a large extent this was fueled by the elegant [...]
As I promised, here is the second part of my notes on setting up a new Mac. This time I will focus on development tools for Ruby on Rails.
MacPorts
In theory, Ruby is already installed on the Mac. Unfortunately, the bundled Ruby interpreter has some problems, and even if it didn’t, you’d want to use a [...]
I’ve been working with Ruby (mostly Ruby on Rails) for over a year now, both at work and at home, but I still haven’t settled on a Ruby IDE or editor. Most of my development is done in Linux, but lately I’ve started working in Mac OSX, as I have recently adopted an old PowerBook [...]
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