Tips for Optimizing Rails on Oracle

My article Tips for Optimizing Rails on Oracle has been published on the Oracle Technology Network site! I can’t say how much i liked working on this.

I tried to synthesize in one place all that needs to be known to make the best from the two technologies and explained all of the tips in oracle-specific terms.

Rails on Oracle comes out as a good performer, but my only regret is that i did not have time to investigate (and maybe contribute back to the community) on adding proper bind variables support to ActiveRecord, which would have been the definitive optimization, but I see that the subject is being actively discussed on the core developers ML, so we may get there soon ;)

On the side, for those interested, I made “a Rails “version” of the HR schema that has been modified to directly comply with the common Rail conventions”

I hope that what i wrote there makes sense and I’d love to hear what you think!

technorati tags:oracle, xe, ruby, rubyonrails, database

A big day for Rails

I feel that yesterday was a BIG day for Rails. To say it with the words of ThoughtWorker Jon Tirsen:

We had a problem…and the solution is JRuby.

ThoughtWorks will adopt jruby as the deploy platform for their Mingle enterprise project management platform.

The problem was that most of their clients have well established IT infrastructures which cannot be changed so easily to accommodate a new stack. But Mingle is built with Rails, allowing them a huge productivity.

The dichotomy between the scarce client willingness to add new (different, unknown) blocks to their infrastructure and the power of the new tools (specially the ease of development) is something that anyone doing contract-development work faces.

Sometimes the clients don’t give a damn about the technology used, other times they can be pushed to change but most of the time we are required to used the already established technologies (at a higher cost).

Being able to run on a JVM, will remove many obstacles to the enterprise adoption of Ruby and Rails, and having a ThoughWorks backing this solution in production will raise the awareness that this is a feasible.

technorati tags:rails, thoughtworks, jruby, mingle

The Typer reviewed

I got a nice easter present yesterday: The Typer  got reviewed on the Rails App Week by Darren at The Web2.0 Show

They nailed it right:  it’s simple by purpose, and i’d dare to say that it has been a big experiment for me in building a clean and simple interface that makes sense for the application.

Posts about thetyper have been very few in the last months, but this is not because the application itself was abandoned, but rather because the typer achieved its goals, and was good enough for my own use.

Some of the techniques i learned while developing it have been useful for me and will spark in various projects that I’m doing as a freelance. Moreover I’m planning some improvements to the interface which will go towards further reducing modality of the interface and improving keyboard commands.

I hope that more people will use it and find it useful, and I’ll be listening to their suggestions to improve it (if you wish you can contact me at luca (at) thetyper.com ).

technorati tags:thetyper, rails, theweb20show

Easy creation of a Rails application in Subversion

ok… saying the title is even longer than typing the command:

svnrails --url ./repos/my_app/trunk my_app

this will make sure you have a functional empty rails application in your local repository that is it will:

• create a my_app rails application
• import the application into repository
• checkout the application from svn
• remvoe and ignore the log and tmp files
• rename the database.yml file

nice and easy!

You can read about it here, and download the svnrails.rb script.

technorati tags:rubyonrails