By the final day of the conference my head was about to explode with the amount of new information crammed into it. There were some great tips and tricks on the final day, but overall, I think the conference peaked on day two. Here’s a run down of the sessions for day three:
- Buried Treasure: Hidden Rails Tips by Dave Thomas
- The Streamlined Framework by Justin Gehtland
- Rinda and DRb by Justin Gehtland
- Amazon’s S3 Web Services by Marcel Molina, Jr.
- Rake: Building Up Ruby by Jim Wierich
- Rails Production Tips and Tricks by James Duncan Davidson
Dave Thomas started out the day with a collection of Rails (and Ruby) tips and tricks that he’s acquired. He gave an overview of with_scope which sets default params for ActiveRecord methods. Next were named routes with_options and the fact that with_options works with any method that takes a hash (such as table creation in migrations). The returning … do … end block format which saves you from having to explicitly return your object after doing some other work first. The ampersand-colon trick which Dave calls the Blockinator:
{lang=“ruby”}
%w{ cat dog }.map(&:upcase)
The date and time goodies added by Rails were discussed next (such as the various to_s versions, like :db, :short, :long and ActiveSupport’s DATE_FORMATS hash which you can add your own formats to in environment.rb). Enumerable extensions such as group_by, index_by and sum. Array extensions like in_groups_of and to_sentence. String extensions like at, from, to, first, last and each_char. Subversion integration in the Rails scripts (—svn option to generate/destroy). Using your app via the console, reload! in the console, setting a default object in irb. And several useful TextMate tricks. Next up was Justin with his talk about Streamlined. Streamlined is a pretty nice framework for building the back-end of your Rails app (or for an enterprise web app, possibly the front-end as well). But, frankly, I’m sick and tired of hearing about it. I’ve attended at least four different events where either Stu or Justin presented Streamlined. After a short break, Justin came back and spoke about Rinda and DRb. Since I’d attended Brian Sletten’s NoVA RUG presentation this was all review for me. The ideas behind Rinda and DRb are very interesting and I would encourage you to read up on them. Next Marcel gave an overview of his AWS::S3 library which makes it very easy to use Amazon’s S3 service from your Ruby programs and it even comes with an interactive shell for working with S3. Following lunch Jim gave an excellent presentation on Rake and showed how to create a task for generating graphs in PNG format from digraph models. He started off with a very simple example and then refactored it to use the various features of Rake such as dependencies, file tasks, file lists, dynamic tasks, the CLEAN and CLOBBER lists, rules, pathmapping, library tasks, and finally, incorporating your own Rake tasks into your Rails projects. The final presentation of the conference discussed production tips and tricks by Duncan. He attempted to answer the most common questions regarding going into production such as:
- How much hardware do I really need? Two to four machines for redundancy: primary and backup web servers and primary and backup database servers.
- How many Mongrel instances should I fire up? Two to four instances on a dual core machine, the rule of thumb is # of CPU’s * 2.
- What should I do with my logfiles? Logfiles are gold for root cause analysis, you should aggregate logs onto a single machine, you may wish to use something like the FiveRuns solution or syslog over the network and ensure that you always filter out sensitive data.
- What kind of load balancer should I use? You could try round-robin DNS, but Pound/Pen software load balancers are quite good. A hardware load balancer is fine if you have the money but is overkill.
- Should I use Amazon’s EC2? Consider it, but keep an eye on it.
- How often should I deploy? Often.
- Should I deploy into production with edge Rails? You can, there are many others that do it, but be prepared for issues. Unless you’re really comfortable with it, just use Rails 1.2 for now.
- How do I test with real-world data? Get your production data back to the development team.
Overall, I thought this small regional conference was defintely worth it. Especially since I spent my own money to attend (unfortunely I don’t get to work on Rails at my day job). The single track was great for keeping everyone on the same page and fostering great inter-session discussion. If the Rails Edge is headed your way, I would definitely encourage you to attend.