Category: Uncategorized

JRuby is something we’re very excited about as it bridges the gap between the Java and Ruby worlds, bringing a wide range of new advantages to developers. You can take advantage of the mature JDBC, utilize Java Application Servers such as Glassfish for deployment with simple WAR’s rather than Capistrano, or use existing JavaBeans and … Continue reading Getting Started with JRuby

For the simple reason that it’s the only static web server I’ve seen that supports Solaris’s Event Ports events { worker_connections 1024; use eventport; } I’m cutting over the ton of static servers we have to it. If you’re interested in a x86/64 build for Solaris http://assets1.joyent.com/opt-nginx-amd64-build.tgz http://assets1.joyent.com/opt-pcre7-amd64-build.tgz Just drop it in place $ ln … Continue reading OK nginx is cool

Here’s how you do it. First, you take what is considered a pinnacle of x86 server design, the glorious x4200 where every single chip has been selected for maximum reliability and performance. Like, say, the quad on-board Intel Gigabit Ethernet chips. Then, you create a new revision called the x4200 “M2” and replace the first … Continue reading How to completely ruin a great piece of server kit (regarding the Sun X4200 M2)

I’ll be doing a half-day tutorial at RailsConf 2007 Thursday morning titled Scaling a Rails Application from the Bottom Up. The abstract is: Ruby On Rails is an opinionated framework for developing web applications and has a considerable amount of flexibility in the back end. While the framework is quite successful in removing the need … Continue reading Jason Hoffman will be doing a tutorial at RailsConf 2007 in Portland

Great article on the origins of ZFS by Al Riske. (Found link from Gruber on Daring Fireball.) We’ve written about ZFS many times on this weblog. Oh, and Bill and Jeff aren’t as goofy as they appear in the article. Jeff (on the right) is actually a fine wine expert in addition to roasting his … Continue reading Origins of ZFS

Sun is releasing the source to Java SE, Java ME, and Glassfish in nine and a half hours, and then releasing the rest of the stuff around the spring of 2007. Most interestingly they’re releasing it under the GPLv2 license. Floyd Marinescu has a great explanation as to ‘Why GPL?’. Once it hit midnight eastern … Continue reading 9.5 hours until Java is open-sourced

Via this and that, I found myself reading PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast The title PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast and subtitle Despite the buzz around sexy new frameworks like Rails and Django, PHP is more dominant than ever initially commits the same fallacy that others have and that is to compare frameworks (Rails and … Continue reading Are Lines of Code really a measure of either success, productivity or popularity?

The Rails Conference in London was great fun. The only downside is that I spent my last day there ill, and it’s only now (about 9 days later) that I’m starting to feel OK. Mind you, I still completely barfed (correction: projectile vomited) up lunch today and have a nagging cough, a cough that while … Continue reading Jason Hoffman’s European Rails Conf Presentation

Via Ludo I came to read why processes scale better than threads (a topic that comes around every now and then). But the case is really made in Joe Armstrong’s recent Concurrency is Easy where he does a great job connecting the philosophy behind erlang to common human experiences. Each human is a process you … Continue reading Erlang processes are human too

Zed Shaw’s mongrel “is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI.” And saying that it’s “fast” is true. The performance you get from a single mongrel process listening on a port is quite good. You … Continue reading Evaluating proxy engines and load balancers for mongrel-driven ruby on rails applications: an introduction and an open call