ADS specializes in using Ruby on Rails to build advanced, scalable, database-backed web sites for organizations of all sizes. Find out more at our website.

In my last post, Create and Deploy a JRuby app to the GlassFish gem in 10 minutes or less on Mac OS X, I mentioned using the JDK 1.6 (a.k.a. SoyLatte) to get the performance benefits from JRuby 1.1 RC2. Installing it is a snap, no compiling necessary. Here is what to do:

• Download SoyLatte 1.0.2 for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. For authentication use username: jrl, password: I am a Licensee in good standing
• Unzip the package and put the entire directory where you want it
• Optional: rename the folder to soylatte16-1.0.2
• Add the soylatte16-1.0.2/bin path to your $PATH variable to use soylatte rather than the JDK 1.5 that comes installed
• Fire up a terminal session and type “java -version

If everything worked out, you should see something similar to:

java version "1.6.0_03-p3"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_03-p3-landonf_03_feb_2008_02_12-b00)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 1.6.0_03-p3-landonf_03_feb_2008_02_12-b00, mixed mode)

Enjoy the performance!

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Robert Dempsey, Project Director of ADS and Founder of Rails For All, will be speaking at the Sarasota Java Users Group meeting on November 15th. The talk with be a front to back overview of Ruby on Rails. Here’s what you get:

Ruby

• Overview
• Ruby’s growth
• Objects everywhere
• Ruby is flexible

Ruby on Rails

• Overview
• Why Ruby on Rails
• Uses of Ruby on Rails

How to create a basic Rails application

• Create a Rails application
• What is MVC
• The structure of a Rails application (where everything is)
• Connect to a database
• Create scaffold
• Fire it up and see what we have

Testing the Rails (if there is time)

• BDD (our preferred approach)
• RSpec

Come and enjoy! We will see you there.

That phrase is something I heard on a cartoon when I was a kid. It is still relevant today, and something that Brion Vibber can relate to. Last night at the Orlando Java Users Group it was standing room only to hear the Wikipedia CTO talk.

Wikipedia is a incorporated, 501(c)(3) not for profit organization, that runs one of the most popular websites on the Internet, with an average of 32,000 hits per second. They run this incredible site with 300 hundred servers, 3 data centers, a technical staff of four (that’s right, four), and the open source LAMP stack. At the core of Wikipedia is MediaWiki, an open source package you can use for your projects. Add to that Lucene, a powerful Java based search engine (that we Rails folks can utilize too), a number of caching packages including Squid, APC and memcache, MySQL replication, geographic DNS and a whole lot of technical expertise and voila, Wikipedia.

Frankly, I was blown away by the sheer scale of it all, and their total utilization of every machine under their control, all with a $1 million per year budget. Nothing sits idle. Web servers are also memcache servers, and storage is distributed throughout the farm. A few tricks that I picked up were:

• Applying schema updates to the slave databases first, and then swap out the masters
• Divide database servers into groups
• Split data along functional boundaries (they use language)

It was a great time. A big thanks goes out to Mike Levin for brining Brion over for an excellent talk.

Brion Vibber, CTO of Wikipedia, will give a presentation tonight at the Orlando Java Users Group, held at DeVry University by the Mall of Millenia. Admission is free and the company is good. Networking and food are from 6pm-7pm, followed by Brion’s presentation at 7. This should be very interesting. A big thanks goes out to Mike Levin for lining up such a fantastic speaker. We will see you there.