Posted by Gerald on August 27, 2008
Welcome back to the Vancouver.rb Q&A series. Today let’s welcome Vancouverite Sunny Hirai – founder and CEO of MeZine Inc.
Caffeine is multi-threaded so requests do not block each other and you get to focus more on building your application and less time on getting your application to work smoothly. Merb is multi-threaded as long as you don’t use ActiveRecord or other single-threaded libraries.
With Caffeine, you can take any application you’ve built and, with no code changes, drop it into your new project. You could take somebody else’s forum application, for example, and use it in your project. Caffeine handles the differences between user models, database storage, file storage, templating, etc.
To make it work, we had to rethink everything from routing, to the database, to the user model and in many cases the abstractions are in different places than Rails, Merb or other popular frameworks.
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Posted in Rails, Ruby, S3, Vancouver, caffeine, databasescaling, gomarkup, interview, merb, mezine, processorscaling, sequel, storagescaling, sunnyhirai | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on July 29, 2008
Welcome back to the Vancouver.rb Q&A series. Today let’s welcome Vancouverite Jim Pick, 38.
dRuby is very nice compared to other techniques, because there is almost no stubbing code required at all. On the other hand, any interface that needs to be public and portable to other languages is probably better handled using something like REST and JSON.
TiddlyWiki is a JavaScript wiki implementation that can run entirely inside a users browser, saving locally instead of to a remote server. I am interested in developing a true distributed wiki implementation that supports a local distributed revision control store and conflict resolution — I think TiddlyWiki is an ideal platform to start that from.
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Posted in Ruby, Vancouver, cloudcomputing, druby, interview, jimpick, tiddlywiki | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on June 12, 2008
Welcome back to the Vancouver.rb Q&A series. Today let’s welcome Victorian and soon Vancouverite Adam Palmblad – the cofounder and dev lead of startup TeamPages.com.
Our photos and uploads are handled with Rick Olson’s attachment_fu. Emails were initially problematic, but between ar_sendmail and some improvements I’ve made to it (maybe open-sourced one day), that problem is solved.
We run Mongrel and Nginx, and I’m happy with that setup, despite knowing some people who are quite happy with LiteSpeed.
On a big development branch we’ve just switched to Rails 2.1 and I’m pretty happy with that – named_scope has been good fun to work with.
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Posted in Rails, Ruby, Vancouver, adampalmblad, ar_sendmail, attachement_fu, interview, teampages | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on June 4, 2008
Let’s follow the example of the Seattle Ruby Brigade (Seattle.rb) and let’s start a weekly Vancouver Open Ruby Hack Night every Monday.
Interested? Let us know on the Vancouver.rb mailing list/forum and join us for the 1st Open Ruby Hack Night at Waves Coffee at the Hastings and Richards corner (offering free wireless) in downtown Vancouver one block from the Harbour Centre.
When: Monday, June 9th, 2008 – 7pm – Whenever (9ish)
Where: Waves Coffee, 492 West Hastings St.
Comments? Suggestions? Send them along to the Vancouver.rb forum/mailing list. Thanks!
Posted in Events, Meetup, Rails, Ruby, Vancouver | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on April 8, 2008
The Planet Vancouver.rb (planet.vanrb.com) publishes Ruby/Rails stories from in and around Vancouver for easy reading or subscription in a single “river of news”. Latest stories include:
- JRuby 1.1 Goodness – Important, Why? – by Tim Bray
- Typo by Geoffrey Meredith
- Ruby and other Gems by Avi Bryant
- Presentation Tip: Haml Rocks! by Eric Promislow
- Be Less Stupid and Ugly – Using git with vlad by Joe Bowser
Interested in getting your blog included? Send a blurb about your blog highlighting some Ruby/Rails stories to the Vancouver.rb Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!
Posted in JRuby, Vancouver, avibryant, ericpromislow, geoffreymeredith, joebowser, planetvanrb, timbray | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on March 10, 2008
Welcome back to the Vancouver.rb Q&A series. Today let’s welcome Vancouverite Brock Whitten.
Rails is awesome. I try my very best not to say things like Merb is “better” than Rails but it is. Let’s keep in mind that part of the reason it’s great is because it is a lot like Rails and Merb was able to learn from the mistakes Rails learned the hard way. The most obvious advantage that Merb has is for writing APIs. If you were to build an API with Rails you are loading this entire (kitchen sink) framework for something very simple. Think alone of all those view helpers you won’t be using yet they are being loaded for every instance of Mongrel. This is like driving a motor home to the cornerstone to buy milk. Merb on the other hand is broken into chunks (merb-core, merb-more, plugins) so you only load what you need. This makes Merb multiple times faster than Rails.
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Posted in Rails, Vancouver, brockwhitten, git, interview, merb, merbman, openwebvancouver, pmpknpi, rails2, rest, sintaxi | 2 Comments »
Posted by Gerald on February 29, 2008
In a new monthly series I will spotlight Ruby projects from Vancouver.rb members starting off with a little Ruby gem – Slide Show (S9) – by yours truly 
What’s Slide Show (S9)?
Slide Show (S9) is a free web alternative to PowerPoint and KeyNote in Ruby that lets you create slide shows and author slides in plain text using a wiki-style markup language that’s easy-to-write and easy-to-read.
New in v0.2 are “loss-free” vector grahpics gradient themes. See some samples online using the “classic” sixteen web colors plus nine gradient styles such as “Diagonal”, “Radial Off Center”, “Top Bottom” and more. Try the “Radial Repeat” theme for some free psychodelia. (Note: Built-in SVG browser support required – e.g. use Firefox or Opera). Or try the Microformats slide show live on your very own desktop.
Find out more at the Slide Show (S9) project site. Questions? Comments? Send them along to the Free Web Slide Show Alternatives (S5, S9 And Friends) Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!
Interested in getting your Ruby project spotlighted in the new Vancouver.rb series? Send a blurb to the Vancouver.rb Forum/Mailing List and tell us about your Ruby project to get it all started.
Posted in Ruby, Vancouver, fullerscreen, geraldbauer, operashow, s5, s9, slideshow, spotlight | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on December 19, 2007
You are invited to join us for RubyCamp 2008 in Vancouver on Saturday, January 26th.
RubyCamp is a free one-day gathering for Rubyists and Railers.
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Posted in Events, JRuby, RFacebook, Rails, Ruby, S3, Vancouver, rails2, rubycamp, rubycamp2008 | Comments Off
Posted by Gerald on December 11, 2007
Mike Cantelon writes in that the Vancouver PHP User Group organizes Vancouver’s 1st Two-Day Open Web Conference 2008 at Canada Place at the Vancouver Convention & Expo Centre from Monday April 14th to Tuesday April 15th in 2008.
The organizers invite you to send in your talk proposal on open web technologies including – of course – Ruby on Rails and other Ruby gems.
Deadline for talk proposals is Dec 31st 2007. Registration opens Dec 22nd 2007 at $100 early bird pricing. After January 31st 2008 registration jumps to $150.
Posted in Events, Rails, Ruby, User Groups, Vancouver, mikecantelon, openweb, openwebvancouver2008, php, rails2 | Leave a Comment »
