Vancouver.rb Q&A with Sunny Hirai (MeZine) on Rails, Merb vs. Caffeine and Processor, Database and Storage Scaling, and More

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.

Vancouver.rb Q&A with Jim Pick on Ruby and Cloud Computing, Distributed Ruby and Wikis and More

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.

Vancouver.rb Q&A with Adam Palmblad on Startup TeamPages.com, Ruby on Rails, Tips and Tricks on Getting Started, and More

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.

Vancouver.rb Q&A with Brock Whitten on Rails, Getting Off Rails (Merb), PmpknPi (Blog in Merb), Git (GitHub, Gitorious) and More

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.

Q&A with Brian LeRoux (Nitobi) on Rails, Ajax, Ruby-Generated JavaScript(RJS) and More

Welcome to episode one of the Q&A with Vancouverite and Nitobian Brian LeRoux.

Ruby on Rails, especially in recent incarnations, has powerful support for creating RESTful applications. You can serve JSON encoded data back to the client as easily as XML or HTML which from an Ajax perspective kicks serious ass. While Rails does come bundled with Prototype and Scriptaculous it works equally well with JQuery, MooTools and, of course, the Nitobi Complete UI Ajax Suite. Ruby-generated JavaScript (RJS) changed my life. Specifically, the ability to dynamically render partials via an XMLHttpRequest (XHR). Building kick ass user experiences has never been more elegant, easier or faster.