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.

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.

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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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.

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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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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For the last 3 years a lot of people have been asking “Why should one use Ruby on Rails when my framework X is clearly superior?” or something like this.

That’s a good question, raises a lot of good points but the way those discussions end are a real shame for the whole community to say the very least. I can’t praise myself too much either because I was part of some flame wars as well and I don’t like what I said in some occasions as well. Yes, I acted like a troll myself and for that I apologize.

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Page down for brazilian portuguese article

Disclaimer: This video is hosted at Veoh and can be re-linked to any website without modifying either the video or audio. I am uploading it to Google Video and Vimeo (recommended).

Update 12/12: For those of you that think I was too fast in the video, I just posted a Tutorial with most of the content you can see in the screencast plus a few bonuses. I’ve split it into Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy!

The First Screencast

Rails 2.0 was released officially last friday and it was a coincidence because I would present a keynote about it at our local “Rio on Rails”: http://www.rioonrails.com.br event here in Brazil. In this keynote I first presented the Rails 2.0 screencast. Tonight I decided to replay it a second time and mix an english narration over it.

I didn’t do deep research but I think this is the very first Rails 2.0 screencast released – correct me if I am wrong. The inspiration was, of course, the Creating a Weblog in 15 minutes the original screencast by David Hansson that caused so much discussion and polemic and that ultimately made Rails recognized throughout the internet.

The irony is that David made the real time blog programming during his keynote at FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre), back in 2005 here in Brazil. At that time almost no one knew what Rails was all about and very few people attended it. Now, almost 3 years later I’d like to go full cycle over it and make the very first Rails 2.0 screencast available from Brazil again. I hope this time our local development community pay more attention.

This time Rails doesn’t have to prove itself: it’s already got past this part. 2.0 is not about revolution, it’s about a stable and steady evolution. It’s about refinement and polish, making for an even greater user experience. I am enjoying it very much.

Without further ado, here it goes:


The First Rails 2.0 Screencast from akitaonrails on Vimeo.

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