JBackground: Asynchronous JRuby Task Execution

last updated Sunday, May 31, 2009, by Cory Osborn

Oftentimes, when building a web application, you will find user-initiated actions that cause long-running tasks to be started.  This could be something as simple as sending an email, communicating with third-party APIs, or analyzing and re-indexing a set of documents.  For a lot of these cases, waiting for these tasks to finish before returning a response to your user is a recipe for a disasterous user experience. 

There are a wide variety of solutions to executing these t... read more

Categories: Programming
Tags: jruby, thread, multithreaded, jbackground, java, asynch, activemessaging, backgroundrb
Comments: 0

RailsConf Day 2 - Non-Fixtured Data

last updated Wednesday, May 13, 2009, by Cory Osborn

So, I went in to this session with high hopes.  The morning had started well with DHH's introduction to Rails 3 and continuing on with a good introduction to some of the pitfalls and best practices with Rails Engines.  However, I couldn't have been more disappointed.  There was a great session just waiting to happen here.  Once you move beyond simple data models, fixtures can begin to get unwieldy to maintain.  The unfortunate thing was Kevin Barnes' overall presentation was... read more

Categories: Programming
Tags: railsconf, ruby on rails, fixtures
Comments: 0

RailsConf Day 2 - Rails Engines

last updated Tuesday, May 12, 2009, by Cory Osborn

This is a continuation of my previous day 2 post.

After the DHH keynote, I continued my morning at The Even-Darker Art of Rails Engines.

Rails Engines

If you've been around Ruby on Rails since it was in the 1.xx releases, you've probably heard of engines.  They're a handy way of taking the plug-in concept to an entire sub-system of an application.  I think the most common example would be for an authentication system that could be dropped in, controller, routes, views and a... read more

Categories: Programming
Tags: rails engines, engines, ruby on rails
Comments: 0

RailsConf Day 2 - DHH Keynote

last updated Wednesday, May 06, 2009, by Cory Osborn

So day 2 of RailsConf was bookended with two doses of DHH and plenty of good information in between.  Obviously I couldn't make it to all the sessions, but I enjoyed most of those I attended.  There were even a few gems to be found as Tim Ferriss asked us all to bask in his self-perceived bubble of awesomeness.  My personal trek took me into the resurgance of acceptance of Rails Engines, the loathing of fixtures, another JRuby talk, explorations of the Page Rank algorithm, and a case s... read more

Categories: Programming
Tags: railsconf, ruby on rails, dhh, xss, router
Comments: 0

RailsConf Day 1 - SproutCore

last updated Tuesday, May 05, 2009, by Cory Osborn

Day 1 of RailsConf and completely centered completely on tutorials.  I decided to attend Nick Sieger's JRuby on Rails tutorial in the morning and split my afternoon between Mike Subelsky's Building Next Generation Web Apps with Rails and SproutCore in the first half and Blake Mizerany's A Hat Full of Tricks with Sinatra to finish the day.

See my previous post for my takeaways from the JRuby on Rails tutorial.

SproutCore

It seems software development continues to move through an... read more

Categories: Programming
Tags: sproutcore, ruby on rails, software architecture, extjs, railsconf
Comments: 0