Rails 3 features

Yehuda Katz over at Engine Yard has a great post on some of the upcoming changes to rails 3. I’m really excited to see how it ends up. I especially excited to see what performance gains can be achieved with it running on a 1.9 ruby stack. Also of interest is the class level responder addition. That makes the code so much more compact and easy to read.

Redis

Redis

http://code.google.com/p/redis/

I just came across this really cool persistent alternative to memcached.  I haven’t spent too much time looking at the internals, but it accepts write operations and writes then asynchronously. This introduces the possibility of some data loss if you have pending writes, and the machine goes down or the like, but overall, the performance boost and persistence more than make up for it in most use cases.

I’ve played around with it on my macbook pro (very simple to build and get running), and it seems pretty cool.  It supports more features than memcached like, list and set operations (which are atomic), and push/pop operations.  This means that this could be a good candidate for distributed queueing and messaging systems.  Not to mention, it also supports master/slave replication!

Also, currently the ruby client supports consistent hashing (which I haven’t used yet), but that adds a lot to the scalability.  Given the speed (reported at 110,000 SETs/second, 81,000 GETs/second), I can see Redis coming into use in a lot of situations where you don’t need all the overhead and guarantees that a ‘real’ database gives you.

The only downside that I can see at the moment is that it has to read the entire dataset into memory.  That limits the size of your datasets, so estimate your data size before going this route.  Also, another glaring omission is a Java client.  There are some in the works (and I’ve thrown together a simple one), but nothing that is polished and ready to use.

Rails request details

I was recently looking around for some details on the way Rails handles requests. Detailed info was actually pretty hard to come by (I didn’t really want to start reading the source code), but I did manage to find this by the guy who started Engineyard.com

Rails Request Handling

Definitely worth a read.

RoR videocasts

There are a couple of sites that I like to go to for Ruby on Rails videocasts.  The first is

Railscasts.com

This has some very good information that will definitely help you jazz up your sites. From integrating payments processors to adding some nifty javascript effects, this site should keep you busy for quite some time.  I used this sight quite a bit when I was first learning RoR, and it definitely saved me some time.

A newcomer that I’ve just started checking out is

Scaling Rails

As you can probably tell from the name, this site deals primarily with scaling Ruby on Rails apps.  Since it seems to be a common refrain in internet newsgroups to say that RoR doesn’t scale, I am particularly excited to see a thorough and concise set of videos on the subject.