ruby on rails, jruby, aws, ec2, exalead

Ok so it’s not quite Schwarzenegger but last week I terminated a twenty year relationship with Microsoft and bought a Mac. Now I just need to get hold of the Apple uniform and I’ll officially be part of the club!

After more than a year of pontification on what exactly to buy as a replacement for my ageing Dell Inspiron laptop, I finally settled on a shiny new 13” MacBook Pro and an even shinier 24” Cinema Display. So far I’m pretty chuffed with my choice.

Way back in 2007, Rails 2.0.2 changed the default database from MySQL to SQLite3, making it easier for newcomers to get up and running with Rails quickly without having to worry about setting up a database. Unfortunately for Windows users, trying to install the SQLite3 gem with gem install sqlite3-ruby will result in the following error:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while…
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3-ruby:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

For well over a year now attachment_fu has been my plugin of choice for adding file uploads to our Rails applications, but recently my fellow WebFellas have been raving about Paperclip from the clever guys at thoughtbot. As I’ve just started yet another new project I figured it was time to take Paperclip for a spin.

Rails 2.1 has just been out a week and so far something that seems to have passed most people by is that it now includes much better caching capabilities, including built-in support for memcached.

Last week I reached the point with an application where I needed to cache some models in memory to get a performance boost and decided to check out the current status of plugins like cache_fu and CachedModel to make sure they’d work with Rails 2.1. It was completely by accident that I stumbled across this innocent looking commit by DHH from start of this year and realised that Rails already had everything I needed!

Back in December I posted about ImageScience and RubyInline on Windows. Turns out I wasn’t the only one trying to get this combination working: according to Google Analytics it has become our second most popular blog entry (for the naturally curious this is the most popular).

Earlier this year I started using RSpec and loved it immediately. Testing is not the most exciting or glamorous part of software development but a behavioural driven approach really appealed to me, as did the much more readable RSpec syntax.

To get me started I bought the RSpec Basics screencast from PeepCode (which has since expanded into a 3 part series). It was a good introduction but, as is often the case in Rails-land, it left me with a case of Mac envy.

The screencast includes a section on using autotest (part of the ZenTest package) and Growl to get instant pop-up notifications when specifications pass or fail. But what about me on my trusty Dell laptop? Where are my shiny notifications?

The good news is that autotest also includes support for Snarl, a Windows alternative to Growl. Hurrah!

According to the website ImageScience is a clean and happy Ruby library that generates thumbnails – and kicks the living crap out of RMagick. What it fails to mention is that by the time you’ve jumped through all the hoops necessary to get it running on Windows you’ll be qualified to start working as a professional acrobat.