I decided to test Ruby Enterprise Edition to see if it’s claims about reduced memory usage were true. All of my machines are 64-bit at this point but unfortunately Ruby Enterprise Edition is more optimized for the i386 architecture. Here are the instructions which I used to install Ruby Enterprise Edition on an Ubuntu 7/10 (Gutsy Gibbon) system.

There seems to have been a lot of gem updates and releases recently which is good to see. I’m especially happy with people addressing the problems of BlueCloth with better Markdown processors even though I’m less inclined to use Markdown these days. Anyway, these are all announcements that I think Rails developers should be aware of.

I know there are other cheatsheets out there but I want one that’s close to home. I find myself needing to look up strftime parameters quite often in my Rails development work. Particularly difficult is remembering the different forms for the same time item. Anyway, here is a list formatted for my usage.

So Rails 2.1 is released. Here are some quick thoughts:

• Even with a newer version of gems memory requirements for the upgrade can be hefty. On virtual servers with 512MB of RAM it is best to stop the app and web server instances before installing the new version.
• I’m looking forward to phasing out scope_out present in 1 or 2 apps with named_scope (aka has_finder).
• There have been times in the past where I had much need for gem dependencies but not so much these days. Still a nice feature to have available.
• I’m really interested in playing with the dirty tracking/partial updates. I’m not sure they’ll make a lot of difference in any of my apps but it’s worth testing.

Although this version of rubygems should show up in hardy-backports I’m not sure it will ever be ported to gutsy-backports. So I decided to pull the new version and install it on my Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) systems. I had previously been using 1.0.1 from Debian testing. The steps to install were quite simple. This should work for at least ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 and perhaps other versions as well.

Or perhaps it should be “Yet Another Rails-Like Framework”… In any case Ruby Waves was released today. I read through the tutorial and liked some of the things I saw. Ultimately Rails not being thread-safe is a huge problem that needs to be resolved if it is going to remain a viable framework compared with the other Ruby frameworks such as Merb and Waves. Waves is heavy on magic and in that sense I suppose it is taking Rails to it’s logical extension. I find it interesting that it uses Sequel instead of ActiveRecord as an ORM. I also wonder if any of these frameworks will work on development tools. That’s one area that Rails has been successful and a reason to stick with it and hope that Rails becomes thread-safe (especially in time for Ruby 1.9).

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