Getting into JRuby and the Railsconf 2007 tutorials – the fun begins.
Hello from Railsconf 2007! Thus far, the tutorials are great. I first tutorial I attended was “Scaling a Rails Application” presented by Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, owner of TextDrive and creator of many applications. In a sentence, his presentation can be summed up as: most scalability issues are not a Rails issue (per say), but rather an infrastructure issue (meaning the hardware that sits in front of the app and the servers the app sits on). He and I spoke after his talk about what it takes to test an application for thousands of concurrent users, and JRuby. For testing the capacity of an application, Jason said it can take a number of months and a few hundred thousand dollars. That was great to hear, having told that to a number of clients myself, and seeing their looks of horror. It’s ain’t cheap, and it ain’t quick. He and I also spoke about JRuby, which is getting a lot of press lately and for good reason. I downloaded the latest version and used the tutorial from Myers Development Studio to get it running on my Mac. It took a few minutes and life is good.
Per the JRuby site, JRuby is: ” an 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.” From what I gather, the result is the ability to package up a Rails app in a .war file and deploy it to an app server. Rock! I am told that you can get a 4x performance increase running a Rails app using JRuby. That’s nice. It is also a good way to bring Java developers into the Ruby and Rails worlds, having almost 0 learning curve (you can use NetBeans as an IDE, among others). I will be reading up on JRuby over the next few weeks and will write a post on what I find. If anyone has experience with JRuby please let us know.
The second presentation was Jamis Buck’s “Harnessing Capistrano,” a great presentation outlining how to use Capistrano for deployment (among other things – oh yes, it does more). Jamis is the author of Capistrano, one of the 37signals team, and one of the Rails core team. Download his presentation and read up on the latest.
These two tutorials wet my appetite for more. Tomorrow brings a full day of tutorials, and I will keep reporting on the goods and any tips I learn. If you are here at Railsconf and want to meet up, hit me up at rdempsey at techcfl dot com.
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