After having used Apache Builder for a week and extracted our Warbler-code into a bonafide extension, I’m sharing it with the community under the fetching name Barbler. Barbler integrates itself between the build and packaging stages of the Apache Builder lifecycle and makes calls into Warbler to automate WAR-file creation. Now Warbler does a really good job for packaging standalone Rails apps. Unfortunately I needed something more integrated into our application build process, that pulls in our Spring Framework-based Java code, Scala code, and Rails application and produces a single WAR-file...

At Vamosa we’re big fans of the Java Virtual Machine. It allows us to use the right tool for the job and deliver a high-quality consistent product for our end-users, whilst still getting the most of our developers. For years we were a .NET and Java shop. Our GUI developers would work in Visual Studio writing a C# application that via SOAP webservices would talk to the Java-backend. In June 2008 we decided to abandon our .NET Desktop GUI and redevelop and expand its functionality, delivered to the end-user’s browser using HTML+CSS+JavaScript from our Java-backend. We spend 7months hacking...

Two technologies are currently capturing my imagination, JRuby and Terracotta. JRuby is simply for my purposes the most effective language to tackle most of my computing challenges. Terracotta allows me to take those problems and solve them on large clusters of cheap servers in clouds such as those provided by Amazon EC2. Getting started with JRuby+Terracotta requires a bit of trial and error as its not as well documented as good old Java+Terracotta. The only post you’re likely to find is one by Jonas Boner (see below). During subsequent revisions of both Terracotta as well as JRuby, the example had...

TechMeetup Glasgow #3 is taking place on July 1st. Hey folks, guess what? Time for another TechMeetup in Glasgow, specifically next week Wednesday. The evening will follow the usual format: 2 great speakers, lots of good chat in between talks, and beer and pizza provided by our friends at the Hillington Park Innovation Centre. This month’s speaker’s topics are as follows: Craig Nicol – A talk on the application of genetic algorithms and what makes them useful. Thomas Figg – demonstrating his language interpreter project, giving us an overview what it takes to build a small...

TechMeetup Glasgow #2 is taking place on June 3rd. The first TechMeetup exceeded our expectations. Three great speakers created some vigorous debates. When we asked you to “bring yourself, your experiences, and your opinions”, you certainly heeded our call. We also got some great feedback and with that in mind we’re making some small changes. We’re going to have one less speaker, allowing for more debate and more informal chat in between speaker presentations. We’ll also have more bottles of water available. This month’s speaker’s topics are as follows: Dave...

Tech Meetup is coming to Glasgow on April 22nd. There are a ton of events for entrepreneurs to meet investors and bankers and VC’s but let’s face it, we’re tech, so let’s talk about tech. No name badges, no business models, just the growth of our eco-system and the advance of our tech – be it web apps, software, mobile apps, hardware, games… There’s an overlap across many of these and it’s always interesting to hear what people are hacking together, know about or have worked on before. TechMeetup is just that – a space for everyone to meet up, talk about some of the cool stuff...

Amazon’s EC2 is rightly so the best thing since sliced bread. All of our hosted services at Vamosa run off EC2. Getting our Ubuntu instances provisioned these days is easily achieved using Capistrano, but when we were still get familiar with ‘cap’ it wasn’t always the case. Amazon EC2 uses private/public keys files for root user authentication but you want to use those credentials as infrequently as possible. As RubyOnRails users, we are used to setting up a deploy user which we use to run Apache 2 and Phusion Passenger under. We use that same deploy user to connect to our...

If you’re trying to get RubyOnRails connected to MySQL on Windows Vista as we have done recently at Vamosa, then keep in mind that the current latest versions of MySQL and the MySQL gem are incompatible with each other. At the time of writing, the current versions of MySQL is 5.1 and the MySQL gem is currently at version 2.7.3. We were unable to get this combination to work together and ended up reverting to MySQL 5.0 and MySQL gem 2.7.1. gem install -v "2.7.1" mysql I don’t think you’re missing anything substantial from either MySQL 5.1 or the 2.7.3...

There’s a new meme traversing the Internet. It involves compiling a list of albums (long play records) for each year of your life. In my case there’s 36 years of albums to choose from, going all the way back to 1972. One further rule is that you’re not allowed to pick an artist/band more than once: so no picking Prince for Purple Rain in 1984 and also for Sign O’ The Times in 1987. I’ve spent lunchtime today, and about three hours tonight compiling what I think is the definitive list, although in Ridley Scott terms, I reserve the right to issue “Director’s...

I’ve been playing around with and kicking the tyres of CouchDB for a couple of weeks and I’m truly excited about the project. If I was to use tags to describe CouchDB I’d use the following: apache, opensource, documents, metadata, database, json, javascript, REST, addressability, horizontal scaling, erlang. So I found myself at Railscamp UK on the weekend without a ruby+rails topic to really talk about during the presentations part of the camp. I’m still a noob wrt. Rails, you see. Realising that CouchDB is relevant to most web developers because most developers deal with...