We’ve pushed out the third release candidate for 1.0 of Rails. This release most prominently fixes a memory leak with render_component (which affected Typo among others), the scaffolding bug, and a number of other small things. Please do upgrade. If you’re already running 0.14.1 (RC2), then you don’t need to change anything in the application.
The Rails podcast is back in business with a handful of new shows conducted by Geoffrey Grosenbach of Topfunky. There are interviews with Amy Hoy, Obie, Matt, and Thomas Fuchs. And Geoffrey promise to keep the deliveries regular. Fire up that nano.
Our trusty Rails server Wrath was generating cruft and crust faster than you could say we-have-no-sysadmin, so at RubyConf we decided to remedy the situation and ask for help. Dan Peterson stepped up to the plate and is now officially the new Rails systems administrator. Welcome on board, mate!
And wasting little time, he has already cleaned a few rough corners for performance and, more importantly, upgraded and fixed Trac — the software that runs dev.rubyonrails.com. So no more timeouts, better performance, more features.
Seth Banks has launched Skunk Studios. It’s a games portal for mini-games available for single play or buy. Neat stuff.
Sebastian Delmont from New York City is looking for 1-2 full-time (no telecommuting) Ruby on Rails developers for a new consumer-focused startup. Write him sd at notso.net. 3 Leaf Networks is looking for a single programmer in Santa Clare for work on another start-up in Rails.
Robby on Rails has a great introduction to named placeholders in Rails. Making ActiveRecord::Base.find more readable and secure at the same time, what’s not to like? Please Robby, or someone else, turn a succinct version of this argument into a documentation patch.
Sam Stephenson and Marcel Molina are no longer available for custom consulting jobs through Ionist. Both are now “made men” of the 37signals syndicate. They will certainly continue to amuse us all through projectionist, though.
That restores the 37signals part of the Rails core to 1/3. Still down from 1/1 in January and 1/2 before going to a counsel of 12. But once again respectable ;)
SwitchTower is a utility for executing commands in parallel on multiple machines. It lets you (among many other things) deploy distributed applications with a single command.
When your application is young you may be deploying it to a single machine, which runs the web server, app server, and database all together. In this situation, deploying manually is not unbearably painful. But as your application grows you may find yourself needing to deploy your application to two web servers, four app servers, and two database servers, atomically. This is where SwitchTower steps in as a pain-killer.
Getting Started
Suppose you have an existing Rails application that you want to deploy to a cluster of machines. SwitchTower attempts to make the entire process as painless as possible:
gem install switchtower.switchtower --apply-to /path/to/your/app.config/deploy.rb and fill in the blanks.rake remote_exec ACTION=setup.rake deploy and let the good times roll.Other Capabilities
In addition to simply moving your application to the various boxes, SwitchTower attempts to make the task of maintaining your deployment simpler. Suppose something goes wrong while checking out your code—SwitchTower will detect that and roll back the change, on all deployed machines. This means it is much harder to wind up with your application out of sync on the various boxes.
Other things SwitchTower can do, out of the box:
SwitchTower also makes it very simple to override and extend the standard tasks, and to write your own. The tasks use a simple language similar to Rake that allows you to automate many different tasks.
More Information
Want to know more about SwitchTower? There’s an entire user manual full of useful tidbits at http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17.