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...

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...

As part of the Upstart Hoopla! project I’ve started programming in Ruby, specifically using RubyOnRails(RoR). RoR an interesting programming language/framwork that is obviously the darling of the industry at the moment. Its easy to see why… RoR cuts through so much of the redtape that’s associated with frameworks such as J2EE, or even .Net. The Ruby language itself is bit tougher to get to grips with. It has some mannerism that can be currently best described as strange, compared to the stuff I’m used to, i.e. Python & Java. I say “currently” because I’m still learning these...