June 24, 2006
RailsConf 2006 Report 7 – 2:30 PM CDT
It's another beautiful summer day in Chicago as the Dr. Dobb's Journal coverage of RailsConf 2006 Chicago continues.
Seth Fitzsimmons gave a talk called Lucene Eye for the Ruby Guy that explored Ruby-centric alternatives to the Java-based Apache-sponsored Lucene search engine. He gave a roadmap showing how Swish evolved into Swish-e into Lucene and eventually into the open source Nutch.
Some of the Ruby search toolkits are:
- Hyper Estraier (recommended)
- Ferret (works, but it's buggy), and
- Lucy (deliverables doesn't exist yet, as the project was just approved by the Lucene PMC on June 1, 2006)
Some choices to consider for ActiveRecord integration include:
Seth also mentioned that he is working on his own Rails search plug-in called Searchable, which is similar to acts_as_ferret. He also encouraged the audience to consider using the web services version of Lucene called SOLR once the project gains more momentum.
Matt Biddulph shared his experiences in Rails-enabling a catalogue web application for the BBC (these experiences are recounted in his article. Matt also gave kudos to Cal Henderson for his O'Reilly book titled Building Scalable Websites as a treasure trove of best practices for buidling highly transactional web applications for large audiences. He also mentioned a load testing tool he used on the project called Siege as well as talked about how BBC's political and economic situations had to be accounted for in the technical development and eventual deployment of his application.
In the crowded MeatProgramming Writertopia session, presenter Bill Katz dove deep into the code that makes up the Rails-based writertopia.com site, a service that allows writers to manage their writing portfolios, participate in workshops and manage profiles. Bill used metaprogramming and mixins used to promote Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principles throughout the project.
Rails for the Enterprise, featuring speakers Rick Bradley and Charles Johnson, was a session that many of the conference attendees were looking forward to, including myself. Rick and Charles showed how their Ruby on Rails application replaced a overtaxing Java-based healthcare application. The HIPAA-compliant Rails application they wrote supports 40,000 clients. The original application they inherited was a 250,000 embedded Oracle PLSQL-based legacy application. They originally considered migrating to Java via JBoss, Struts, JSP, Hibernate, EJB3, JUnit, Ant, and CruiseControl and got a big laugh and applause when they flashed their 'book' slide that emphasized how their decision to scrap their Java plans in favor of Ruby on Rails reduced their 20+ stack of Java books to just 3 Ruby books. The talk made quite an overall impact on the audience.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz's presentation on Rails Deployment illustrated his experience with writing his first large scale Rails application, located at yakimaherald.com. He talked about the pros and cons of using different types of web servers (Apache, Lighty, and Pound) and his performance experience working with FastCGI and Mongrel. Ezra also discussed the development of his Ruby plug-in, the BackgroundDRb framework, which makes working with long processes in separate tasks more manageable.
Stay tuned for one more report later today from RailsConf 2006.
Posted at 02:30 PM Permalink
This is a public forum. CMP Media and its affiliates are not responsible for and do not
control what is posted herein. CMP Media makes no warranties or guarantees concerning any advice dispensed by
its staff members or readers.
Community standards in this comment area do not permit hate language, excessive profanity, or
other patently offensive language. Please be aware that all information posted to this comment area becomes the
property of CMP Media LLC and may be edited and republished in print or electronic format as outlined in CMP
Media's Terms of Service.
Important Note: This comment area is NOT intended for commercial messages or
solicitations of business.
|
