The Australian version of ComputerWorld has a great article about how Ruby on Rails is helping Spin Technologies migrate school portal schoolseek.com.au get off .NET. Jordan Brock speaks about how fast Rails is to get started with and recommends that others get going by doing a small application first. Good advice and great to see Rails making headlines down under.

Those of you who love running Rake tasks but don’t like typing are in for a treat. Although there’s been task completion for Rake for a while now, most of the scripts for it are painfully slow, especially with Rails’ Rakefile.

Below is a small zsh completion script that uses a cache file (named .rake_tasks) to improve the performance of your tab keystrokes.

To use, throw it in your home folder somewhere and add source $HOME/.rake_completion.zsh to your .zshrc file.

A few disclaimers: Yes, it doesn’t work with lowercase named rakefile‘s. Only barbarians use such names though, so hopefully you won’t have a problem there. And no, it doesn’t complete the other assorted arguments that the rake command can accept, frankly because I rarely use them.

Without further ado, here’s the bytes.

_rake_does_task_list_need_generating () {
  if [ ! -f .rake_tasks ]; then return 0;
  else
    accurate=$(stat -f%m .rake_tasks)
    changed=$(stat -f%m Rakefile)
    return $(expr $accurate '>=' $changed)
  fi
}

_rake () {
  if [ -f Rakefile ]; then
    if _rake_does_task_list_need_generating; then
      echo "\nGenerating .rake_tasks..." > /dev/stderr
      rake --silent --tasks | cut -d " " -f 2 > .rake_tasks
    fi
    compadd `cat .rake_tasks`
  fi
}

compdef _rake rake

(Use at your own risk. Comments and improvements welcome.)

In case you were wondering if Rails can scale: Eric Hodel reports that the Robot Co-op served 2,587,240 requests through their Rails applications last Saturday.

Do you have any scalability stories to share?

Capistrano is a utility for executing tasks in parallel across multiple remote hosts. It was formerly known as SwitchTower.

Installation:

Version 1.1 introduces a few changes:

• The generated capistrano.rake file is simpler now than it used to be. You can easily append custom options to individual tasks now. For instance, if you want the deploy to be silent, instead of verbose, just add “-q” to the parameter list for that task.
• The generated capistrano.rake file uses the “remote” namespace, so you’ll need to have at least Rake 0.7.0. You can still do “rake deploy” and “rake rollback”, but the other tasks must be prefixed with the namespace (“rake remote:exec”, “rake remote:show_tasks”, etc.)
• The ‘switchtower’ command is replaced by the ‘cap’ command.
• The cap utility is verbose by default. If you want it to be silent, use the -q option. If you want it to be less verbose, you can specify the -v or -vv flags explicitly.
• The cap utility uses more rake-like command-line semantics. Instead of needing to do “cap -r config/deploy -a deploy”, you can just do “cap deploy”. It will look for config/deploy.rb, capfile, or Capfile automatically, and will treat raw parameters as action names.

Upgrading/switching from SwitchTower to Capistrano is a little inconvenient. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• gem uninstall switchtower (remove all versions)
• gem install capistrano
• For each of your Rails projects, do “cap -A .”, keeping your deploy.rb
• For each of your Rails projects, remove lib/tasks/switchtower.rake

Enjoy!

We were served with a “cease and desist” from Raindance Communications, Inc. over the use of their registered trademark SWITCHTOWER on Friday. This led to a wild three-day brainstorming session and a new name for SwitchTower: Capistrano.

New gems and so forth will be available tomorrow, as well as updated documentation using the new name. For existing SwitchTower users, you’ll need to run cap -A . on each of your projects, once the new gems are available and installed. (cap is the new name of the switchtower utility.)

You can read all about the brainstorming process and how the new name was selected on Jamis’ blog.

Rick Olson aka technoweenie has been granted the rank of core and will join the new 12-strong group of developers with commit rights to the Rails source.

Rick has long been a prominent figure in the Rails community with ton of great plugins to his name, but it has been his work on Rails 1.1 that made us realize that he was an obvious fit.

From the upgraded calculations, to enumeration support for RJS, to his work on eager loading, and a ton of other minor issues, Rick has shown strong knowledge and ability across the code base. When Rails 1.1 is released shortly, you’ll be using a lot of Rick’s code.

So congratulations, Rick! You’ve joined the exclusive club of Rails core committers.

SwitchTower author Jamis Buck has provided an excellent manual documenting how to use it. Those who’ve taken the plunge are loving how easy it makes deployment, as well as myriad other tasks. But I’m still always hearing, “We haven’t setup SwitchTower yet but are really looking forward to”.

Enter Rails Machine. It sets out to lower the barrier to using SwitchTower by taking care of all the setup and maintenance. They are scheduling to open their doors in April. For now take a look at the short movie they’ve made showing how easy they’ve made it for you to get going with SwitchTower. They get you up and running in under 5 minutes. No more excuse to not realize how much you love SwitchTower.

The Future of Web Apps summit put on by Carson Workshops was a veritable who’s who with representatives from Delicious, Flickr, Yahoo, Google and others. David Heinemeier Hansson was there speaking on behalf 37signals. The audio for each talk is now online, including the panel discussion which includes all the speakers. Find all the talks here.

Hot on the heals of the fervor behind the upcoming RailsConf, the location of RubyConf 2006 has been announced. This fall it’s going to be in Denver, Colorado from October 20-22, 2006.

Two years ago we had about 70 people at RubyConf. This past year we stopped accepting signups months before the event when 200 tickets were sold. This year’s conference promises to have huge demand.

Venue, schedule and registration should be opening up in the Spring. Keep an eye on the RubyConf site as more details trickle out.

Big thanks to David Black and the others behind RubyCentral for their tireless work setting all this up.

Ever working with a model and you forget what all of its columns are? Ever find yourself with your schema.rb open in a separate window so you can see what the structure is of your tables?

Dave Thomas, of Rails Pragmatic Studio fame (among a brazillion other things), hacked up a plugin that adds a comment block to the top of all of your model classes documenting the current schema for the given model. It ends up looking something like this:

	
Schema as of Sun Feb 26 21:58:32 CST 2006 (schema version 7)

  #
	
id                  :integer(11)   not null
	
quantity            :integer(11)
	
product_id          :integer(11)
	
unit_price          :float
	
order_id            :integer(11)   

  #

class LineItem < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :product

When the schema is updated, the comment is updated to reflect the new schema.
Install it with the plugin script:

script/plugin install http://svn.pragprog.com/Public/plugins/annotate_models

Run it with a custom rake task:



rake annotate_models


Check out the caveats in the README.
Thanks for sharing Dave.