This time I interviewed Luis Lavena. If you’re a Ruby developer working on Windows, you owe him a lot! After all he is the maintainer of One-Click Ruby Installer, the main Windows Ruby distribution. It is a lot of work to maintain such a distro and Luis explains all the hoops necessary to achieve this. The main message: we need more collaborators! Anyone can rant, but there are a few that actually step down from the pedestal and get their hands dirty.

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Phusion Passenger 2.0 and Ruby Enterprise Edition from Carl Youngblood on Vimeo.

We are a little bit late but this is a video interview conducted at RailsConf 2008 by myself and Carl Youngblood (Surgeworks, Confreaks) with Hongli Lai, Ninh Bui and Tinko Andringa of Phusion, creators of Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition, which is fast becoming the deployment method of choice for Rails developers.

Português: Estamos um pouco atrasados mas esta é a entrevista em vídeo feita na RailsConf 2008 por mim e pelo Carl Youngblood (Surgeworks, Confreaks) com Hongli Lai, Ninh Bui e Tinko Andringa da Phusion, criadores do Phusion Passenger e Ruby Enterprise Edition, que está rapidamente se tornando a escolha padrão para deployment.

Ruby on Rails is big. Twitter is big. And because of that they became easy targets for the media and the frustrated pundits wanting a few more pageviews. “Blaine Cook” was one of Twitter’s developers and he kindly agreed to participate on one of my interviews. And, of course, he will answer the question “Does Rails Scale?”

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The Brazilian community has been very busy lately. I just announced Carlos and Tapajós Rails 2.1 PDF

But this is not the only book in town. As I said, Carlos has been leading the Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby for some time now. I always say in all my presentations that “the best part of Ruby on Rails is the community” and this helds particularly true to our Brazilian community.

As a small glimpse of what people are doing, take a look at what Bruno Pedroso, Renato Willi, Wesley Rocha, Júlia de Casto was able to accomplish with the overly complicated and highly artistic Why’s comic stripes:

I think Why would be very proud of this.

If there are other Brazilians that can translate from English to Portuguese, please enroll in this project.

Update 06/09: Carlos just reported that they already have ready the First Rails 2.1 PDF Book thanks to the contributors from the Brazilian community that translated from the original Portuguese to English. This is a first!

Carlos Brando and Marcos Tapajós are two of the best Railers in Brazil and long time collaborators of our community and they just released a very high quality material today.

Carlos has been tracking down every new addition to the Edge Rails since 2.0 for the brazilian audience and since 2.1 was released, he decided to publish his series in a book format. But not only a simple HTML to PDF convertion but a full quality PDF book based on a Ruby DSL he wrote for that purpose and which should be released soon.

Marcos Tapajós is a long term Brazilian Rails Contributor who created the Brazilian Rails plugin which localizes Rails for Brazil (including routes). And he jumped right in to massively help Carlos in this endeavor and the outcome is that the book was finished very fast.

They just released it, not only in PDF format but also the full Ruby source code they created, in order for it to be collaboratively translated from Portuguese to English.

Chris Wanstrath himself was very kind to blog a call to arms at the Github blog to increase the chances of the English version be ready soon.

In Brazil we’ve been working together on English to Portuguese translations for a long time. Recently Carlos has been leading the famous Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby translation into Portuguese with many other Brazilian collaborators.

I am very proud to blog that the other way around has finally came to be: a Portuguese source material being translated to English! This has to be a first in our community.

Both Carlos and Marcos are very close friends of mine and I am very happy for this announcement. It is a nice thing to collaboratively work in educational material other than source code. As David Hansson himself said at RailsConf: share knowledge is one of the most important things to do. Hope you help and enjoy!

It is interesting how great endeavors start.

The very first thing I did as soon as I checked into the hotel was to figure out how to get to the Apple Store. Damn, I like Portland’s MAX train. Once in the 5th avenue we got inside and I left a good chunk of my wallet there. One of my achievements was a small audio recorder for my iPod.

Good thing I bought that because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to record all these awesome audios. I thank again my good friend Julio Monteiro for supporting the audio file hosting.

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So, here it goes, Part 2 of my Rails 2.1 Tutorial. Start from Part 1 if you didn’t read it already.

Disclaimer: If you like this tutorial and you’d like to translate to your own local language, ask me for the original Textile files through my e-mail.

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Rails 2.1 is right around the corner and now comes my update for “The First Full Rails 2.1 Tutorial”.

I will take exactly from where we left off in the last tutorial, so if you still didn’t follow that tutorial I suggest you do it now or download the source code available now at Github. I have added a ‘for_2.0’ tag to denote the last tutorial and a new ‘for_2.1’ tag for the updates I am going to show you now at this new tutorial. You can either follow my previous tutorial to have everything running or you can skip it and just download the example from my Github page.

So, I will consider you have the blog project in a ‘blog’ directory at your environment, and it doesn’t matter if you simply downloaded the zip file or cloned from my github tree.

This is Part 1. You follow Part 2 from here

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That’s for all my friends who don’t speak portuguese. I’ve met outstanding people from all over the world who’ve been very supportive and believed in my goals since the very beginning. People like Satish Talim, Geoffrey Grosenbach and many many other visionaries. Thanks to you all and I hope you keep appreciating the efforts we’re doing here in Brazil.

So, this week I’ve had the worst/best weekend I can remember of. First of all the good stuff: last week the #1 Brazilian hosting company, Locaweb decided to support and invest on Ruby on Rails and its first move was to launch a trial period of a mod_rails based shared hosting plan. But they won’t stop there.

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Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui, from Phusion, shaked the Rails world a few days ago. They unleashed the Holy Grail of Rails deployment: mod_rails which was received with much fanfare, and they deserved it.

They finally settled the big issue that embarrassed Railers in the past. This will also relieve dozens of hosting services that were clueless on how to solve this equation. Now, those two computer science students are above them all with this clever solution. And they have more to come.

I was very fortunate to be able to interview them. I think this is the second interview, InfoQ broke the news first with this other interview which I highly recommend to understand more of the inner gears of Passenger. They are very easy going and it was a pleasure to talk to them.

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I’m very happy to announce that Geoffrey Grosenbach, from TopFunky/Peepcode, kindly offered to support my weblog! I can’t express how much I appreciate this as it indicates that I am in the right direction. I’ve always recommended Peepcode screencasts because they are high quality and I will still recommend them for the same reason: quality. Actually I bought every single item they released so far and enjoyed them all.

Geoffrey also supports many other great blogs like Ryan Daigle, Wanstrath & Hyett, which are great.

I’ll finally be able to replace that ugly Google ads with something way more meaningful now. There are still remaining details between us, but as Geoffrey is someone I totally trust, I decided to already take the Google ads off right away.

Thanks Geoffrey!

Satish Talim, from RubyLearning fame forwarded me 2 question from one of his students.

So I went to to write a few advices for him. Without knowing his level of expertise I tried to encompass tips for young programmers in general.

I hope it makes sense. Feel free to comment and ask questions.

Confreaks just released a new batch of awesome videotaped keynotes from the Goruco 2008 conference held in New York City. If you were not able to attend, that’s our second chance to take a look on what the community is doing.

I am particularly interested in Bryan Helmkamp’s keynote on Story Driven Development with RSpec, as I am myself trying to learn the user stories feature. I can bet Chris Wanstrath’s keynote on ParseTree is a lot of fun as well.

And if you also missed MountainWest RubyConf 2008 as well, don’t miss the videos there!

It is only RailsConf remaining to be taped! It is a waste of resources not to do it like that as we all around the world would immensely benefit.

I was just told by the Phusion guys that mod_rails 1.0.2 is going to be released today! Keep an eye on it. And if you didn’t do so, donate for the Ruby Enterprise Edition program (I am in the second batch already!)

Update 04/30: As I have said, Phusion released 1.0.2 with lots of features explained in their new corporate blog. New features include support for OS X’s built-in Apache, support for Rails below 2.0, more stability, a new tool to measure real memory usage (‘ps’ doesn’t convey the true memory), improved documentation, improved SSL support, and more.

Chris is a very accessible and easy-going guy, and I just got him out of AIM and started the interview right away. For those of you who never heard of ‘Chris Wanstrath’, he is also known for Err the Blog and recently as one of the guys behind the Github phenomenon.

He answered everything in color detail and we speak a lot about his open source projects, performance, scalability and, of course, lots of Git and Github stuff. Hopefully it will make people even more excited with how the Ruby/Rails community is moving things forward all the time.

aos leitores brasileiros: assim que tiver tempo irei traduzir esta entrevista.

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My good friend Vinicius, from Improve IT, and his team of ‘carioca’-Railers just released a new Ruby on Rails web application called just-remind.us. Let me explain what it is:

Just-remind.us is the place to share personal information with a group of friends — the kind of info that you’d rather not expose on a social network, like mobile phone number or e-mail address. It’s like a bulletin board: anyone can place short cards containing some personal info. To begin having fun, create an new group for your social circle and add some cards. The group name will be shared by you and your friends, so everyone can collaborate. Why? Because on a real bulletin board, you can add new cards, or change information in an existing one, even if it was created by a friend. We like this freedom and simplicity. That’s the way just-remind.us is. Only one login and password for the whole group. You log in and see all the cards in one page. Anyone can update any card. It’s that easy.

Enjoy!

Assim como Web 2.0, outro termo usado o tempo todo é Cloud Computing. Muita gente usa para designar muitas coisas. Outro termo usado como sinônimo – mas não sendo exatamente a mesma coisa – é Web Services (não o padrão XML), que na realidade não é nada novo, é o que antigamente chamávamos de ASPs (Application Service Providers). Exemplos disso são serviços como Basecamp para gerenciar projetos sem que a empresa precise gastar em manutenção ou mesmo seu Webmail favorito. São serviços online onde você paga para não precisar se preocupar com infraestrutura. É um tipo de outsourcing de serviços.

Esta semana o Google causou um pequeno furor ao lançar sua resposta a Cloud Computing: o Google App Engine. Vocês podem ver um review do Techcrunch aqui. Mas o que é Cloud Computing? Antes de mais nada, vamos explicar os termos mais usados no mercado:

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Monday, Apr 1st, I was invited to participate in a series of interviews being published at FiveRun’s blog, called TakeFive. It was just published.

Thanks a lot for FiveRuns for choosing me, I am flattered as I don’t yet consider myself in the same luminary league as Chad Fowler, Peter Cooper, Pat Eyler, Satish Talim and all the others in the series. I hope to get up there, though :-)

This series revolves around 5 questions out of 15 that I could choose. Being prolific – as you well know – I actually answered all 15 of them. So I will publish here the remaining 10 that didn’t make into the interview. Hope you like’em.

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Last week I presented ActiveResource’s capabilities to some friends.

In summary, it’s a great library, but not perfect just yet, and should improve in the next versions. On the other hand, the majority of ‘REST’ APIs available – as they say – are not actually RESTful. Flickr and YouTube come to mind. Check out this link to learn on how to talk to Twitter. This other link to learn how to extend ActiveResource for non-REST APIs and this link to understand how to consume YouTube feeds.

But besides that I found out a small surprise: ActiveResource is documented in a way to imply that it has working client-side validations, but it’s not fully implemented! So I decided to investigate what would it take to have it working.

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This week I interviewed another person from the Microsoft camp, Scott Hanselman. I know him from his podcast Hanselminutes. In one episode he interviewed both Martin Fowler and David Hansson at last year’s RailsConf, a truly remarkable conversation.

He also posted a great screencast about Microsoft’s new alternative MVC framework and I thought it would be great to have him at my blog to talk about technology and web frameworks. As I said before I think that we should not become alienated about what’s going on in other fronts and Scott is a very forward thinking and open minded person as well.

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If anyone is trying to install the ImageScience gem (sudo gem install image_science) for your Rails projects, and used MacPorts, you might be having strange problems. The usual command:

sudo port install freeimage

Will fail miserably. That’s because the newest FreeImage port, version 3.10.0, is broken. If you check it out at /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/freeimage/FreeImage3100.zip, the checksums are invalid as the port command states. I tried to download directly from sourceforge.net. But this zip is corrupted. Can’t unzip it manually. Dunno why.

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It was Avi Bryant that evangelized the neat idea of “turtles all the way”, meaning that for a language to be called ‘complete’ it should be able to extend itself. So, the ideal world would have Ruby being extended in Ruby, not in C. JRuby goes as far as it can building up a sandbox for Ruby code to run under the JVM. As cool as it is, we still rely on Java to fully extend it.

Enter Rubinius and its author Evan Phoenix, currently a full-time employee for EngineYard. Rubinius borrows heavily from Smalltalk’s concepts of a virtual machine and does as little as possible in C just for the bootstrap and all the rest is developed over pure Ruby.

Rubinius answers lots of questions about going forward over the current Ruby MRI but also raises several other questions that I hope we can nail down today in this interview with Evan himself.

So let’s get started.

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Last year we had our local event WebDevCamp SP’07, where Manoel Lemos, from the sucessful BlogBlogs introduced us to his friend James Crane-Baker, co-founder of the RedeParede (literally, “NetWall”), a classified Web 2.0 web-service written in Ruby on Rails.

Recently he got in touch with me about releasing his services APIs to the Rails community and therefore I decided to publish more about these Santa Barbara, CA based guys. They are credible people and James actually lived in Rio de Janeiro for a while, so he understands our Latin culture better than the average american, which is good as they plan to cover not only Brazil, but Latin America. I hope everybody can take a look at what they are doing as it sounds very promising, and success cases like this only augments the importance of our community as a whole.

So, here goes James himself explaining his product:

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Hey, I finally decided to deliver a PDF version of my famous First Rails 2.0 Tutorial

So, here they go:

• Part 1
• Part 2

They’re not perfect but should suffice for those of you that prefer to have an offline version.

I also just uploaded the higher quality H.264 Quicktime video for you to download directly through Rapidshare.

Rejoice!

Hello folks! Finally, I added an English-only feed for all of you that only read english articles. For all of you that don’t know it: this is a brazilian portuguese oriented website, but I often write articles in both languages. Now you can subscribe to the feed that will notify you of english-written articles only. Rejoice!

Update 28/01: Seems like myself and James Golick were in sync here :-) We both did screencasts at the same time. He just recorded one for his other great plugin “attribute_fu” and I did it for “resource_controller”. He posted both at his blog. Check it out.

This is my second try to make a useful screencast. I think my last one The First Rails 2.0 Screencast was reasonably good but far from good enough. I thank everybody that has seen it and helped making it one of the most successful pieces I’ve ever made.

I’ve been wanting to explore the Restful Rails concepts in a screencast. First and foremost, I highly recommend Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Peepcode screencast as one of the most comprehensive and easy to understand out there. My screencast is not nearly at the same level of quality or depth. But on the other hand I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Watch the Video

• Vimeo (Stream|Download)
• Veoh (Stream Preview|Download)
• RapidShare (High-Quality, 30Mb in RAR compression)
• through UFRJ (High-Quality, 30Mb Download|many thanks to Marcos Tapajós and the University of Rio de Janeiro)

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The Ruby Way is the undisputed must-have book in any Rubyist bookshelf. Rather than being a ‘reference’ book it explains what it takes to really dive into the intricacies and marvels of the Ruby programming style.

Today I am very happy being able to engage in a conversation with one of my favorite authors, Hal Fulton. This was a great chat and I know people will be delighted as well. He is one of the Ruby veterans and certainly has a lot of experience to share. So, let’s start:

AkitaOnRails: First of all, it is a tradition at my blog to ask for the guest’s background. How long you’ve been at the programming career? How did you first get there? What inspires you about the computer world?

Hal Fulton: I started college as a physics major, but I found that I was taking computer courses for fun. I switched to computer science and the rest was history.

Unlike most younger people now, I never was really exposed to computers until I was sixteen, because personal computers were much less common then. I was hooked right away. I saw the computer as a “magic box” that could do anything I was smart enough to instruct it to do. Really I still feel that way about it.

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Ruby Inside is one of the greatest Ruby/Rails website available and a great source of news. Its creator is the British entrepreneur Peter Cooper, also the author of the recently published book Beginning Ruby, from Novice to Professional, an excellent source for anyone willing to learn the Ruby language.

Peter speaks about Ruby on Rails, business, novices and, as a last-minute exclusive, he comments on the recent Nuclear Zed episode that shocked a lot of people in the community. Just to clarify, Peter answered my questions before New Years Eve, it’s only the last question that was added today.

Once again, I deeply apologize the brazilian audience because I didn’t have time to translate this into Portuguese today, but I will do very soon. Stay tuned.

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1/1: Wow, I am really honestly frightened! I just read this rather long rant from no other than Zed Shaw – creator of Mongrel who, for non-starters, is (was) the #1 in popularity at Working with Rails, just a little bit higher than DHH himself.

Two comments that TechCrunch selected were:

• “This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college.”

• “With Rails I get scrawny cock suckers with carpal tunnel syndrome talking to me like they’re gonna eat my young. Their feeble PHP infected minds can’t grasp advanced shit like objects or closures. When you combine stupid businesses with stupid people using a stupid framework based on a big fat fucking lie on a shitty platform you get the perfect storm of dumbfuck where a man like me can’t find work.”

In the article he literally shows the finger to people like Kevin Clark, Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Michael Koziarski and even David Hansson! He claims to be abused by them and that the Rails market only offered him mediocre jobs. He also attacks ThoughtWorks. We have to admit, he has good points although we can disagree on the presentation.

That’s one true thing: programmers – specially those that become famous overnight – have their egos inflated exponentially. I don’t believe that the Rails Core Team is different. We can’t tell if Zed Shaw is right in every claim or if he exaggerated a lot. But I don’t believe someone like him simply woke up crazy today out of nothing. If he is angry, he has his reasons. Let’s watch how the community reacts in the next few days.

On the other hand, this is not exclusive in the Rails community. As I say all the time, Ruby on Rails is not a perfect technology. None is. Its creators are not perfect, they are human beings like you or me. It is the community that plays the major role in an open source project. Few can have the luxury to be both extremely smart and arrogant at once like a Linus Torvalds, for instance.

Take your own conclusions. Anyway, one Zed Shaw or one Kevin Clark doesn’t make Ruby or Rails worst. It is the Rails community as a whole who’s gonna decide how things go on. If the Rails Core Team really becomes unbearable one day, as Zed accuses them, and the community still believes that Rails is worth it, we always have the last choice of forking it (let’s just hope it is not the case).

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Traducción en Español

As I promised after the Avi Bryant interview, here’s a great conversation with Adrian Holovaty, well known creator of the Django web framework written in Python.

For me this is an important piece because I always say that technology doesn’t have to be about divorce. Technology is about integration. I am a full-time Ruby on Rails developer and evangelist, but above all, I try to be a ‘good’ programmer. And good programmers acknowledge good technology and their creators achievements. And Adrian’s Django is such a remarkable achievement that deserves the attention and success.

So, as my very first post of the year (published at 0:01hs!), I would like to celebrate the great minds of our ‘development’ community, wishing that the good developers use their time creating great technology instead of wasting it in useless flame wars.

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