Until now. The first issue of the Rails Magazine (titled ‘The Beginning’) is out now. Rails Magazine is a real, printed journal covering Rails and the Rails community.

The magazine is primarily addressed to Ruby on Rails developers, however everyone interested in related topics such as Ruby, Web 2.0, Startups, Web Frameworks should find Rails Magazine a valuable resource.

Whether you are new to Rails, a seasoned user of Rails, or a user of another framework or language who just wants to see what the fuss is all about, Rails Magazine is for you. Whether you work in an enterprise or a start-up, Rails Magazine has the information you need to be more successful.

This issue has 36 pages full of quality content. It is printed in glossy full-color, on an 80# matte text stock paper that is FSC-certified and 50% recycled (10% post-consumer waste and 40% pre-consumer waste).

The magazine aims to provide timely and high-quality knowledge to the Ruby on Rails community and it can be ordered through Magcloud in US, UK and Canada for $8 with some additional postage fee. You can also browse the magazine online (preview) on the purchasing site.

The free digital edition (PDF) is well underway and will be available globally in about 2 weeks.

Table of Contents:

• Editorial by Olimpiu Metiu
• Extending Rails Through Plugins by John Yerhot
• Receiving E-Mail With Rails by Jason Seifer
• Delegation in Ruby by Khaled al Habache
• Subscription billing with Saasy by Alex MacCaw
• Making the Switch From RSpec to Shoulda by Dan Pickett
• Playing Hooky a.k.a. web hooks by John Nunemaker
• Adhearsion by Jason Goecke and Jay Phillips
• Rails Performance Analysis by Terry Heath
• Getting Started with JRuby and JRuby on Rails by Joshua Moore
• Artwork by Huw Morgan

The magazine website encourages people to write into the mag to gain recognition, show off skills or to spread the word about your business.

It also has a forum to discuss the articles.

Go and grab a copy of the first issue right now.

Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20090113 is released.

Man, these guys are on fire! If yo are as crazy as I am, you may already been thinking about an update (at least on your development server.) So, let’s see what you can get if you update to this release.

• Tcmalloc support for 64-bit operating systems (which basically means an improved memory allocator that REE now includes on 64 bit systems).
• Ported and incorporated RubyProf GC patches (what you can use in a lot of debugging scenarios to measure the number of objects in memory).
• Improved documentation (which is obviously a required part if you want to know how to get the most out of this version of Ruby).
• More various fixes and patches, thanks to the reports from the community via the REE Google Groups page.(I encourage you to join so you will get notifications about updates and you can always ask other developers if you are having problems. It’s a helpful community.)

Please refer to the official announcement for a complete list of changes, additions and fixes.

So, this is another great update again just like the previous one. What I may have left out from my previous post is the way Phusion deals with time-cost and development balancing:

Obviously, maintaining an open source product is most of the time kinda expensive since most of the time you are not getting paid directly by the end users. However, what makes this satisfying and interesting is when people who need certain features and improvements, they can sponsor them. Ruby Enterprise Edition is a sponsored product, this update was sponsored too, just like the previous version. Developers get paid, people get the exact features they want, and the whole community benefits from this since paid updates make into the public versions. Pretty clever and neat business model this is. If you are using this product and want to support the development, please donate as some of us already did it.

Looking at the big picture it seems like Phusion keeps improving and updating their product which is already a production ready competitor to the more prevalent Ruby VMs (such as the official version of Ruby or JRuby), mainly because of its substantial performance. Also, if The New York Times, Shopify, and even 37signals use it, they can’t be wrong.

Today we’ve received an email from Phusion about an updated version of REE:
Ruby Enterprise Edition 20081205 has been released.

This new update seems to address the most common problems what people have been encountering.

The main updates include:

• Better 64-bit support
• Better Mac OS X support
• RubyGems updated to version 1.3.1. (So you don’t need to update RubyGems like in my previous post)
• REE’s RubyGems no longer makes use of the existing gems (which fixes a lot of confusion and problems with native extensions)
• Integration with the RailsBench garbage collector patches
• A new command to track REE updates easily ($ ree-version)

Please visit the official site for more details and the announcement.

To upgrade from a previous version, simply install into the same prefix that you installed to last time. You can follow this guide in my previous post.

• One of them is the infamous Phusion Passenger which makes deploying Rails applications a piece of a cake using Apache web servers,
• And Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE) which promises better memory management and better scaleability of your Rails applications.

These are really promising projects and Passenger offers a really elegant and automated setup which makes it pretty easy to be installed. However, I still keep seeing people having problems using it with REE and Rails version 2.2.2 on blogs, RailsForum and mostly on IRC.

In this article I will describe how to set up all of them. Hopefully it will help you understand the basic ideology how a Ruby environment is set up.

You will learn how to install and set up the following products for Rails development/deployment:

• Apache 2.2
• Ruby Enterprise Edition
• RubyGems 1.3.1
• Ruby on Rails 2.2.2
• Passenger 2.1.0 (note: this is an edge version, not recommended in production environment, you can still use 2.0.4)

What you will need:

• Apache web server already set up,
• Root privileges to be able to compile and set up your server
• A basic understanding how to use the Terminal.

OK, let’s get started.

Install Ruby Enterprise Edition

Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) is a branch of the official Ruby interpreter which is capable of reducing your Rails applications’ memory usage by 33% on average, as well as improving your applications’ performance. First, you will need to install Ruby Enterprise Edition, you can grab the source files from here.

Now open up the Terminal and navigate to your preferred directory where you store your source files. I’ve got a directory at /usr/local/src. I like keeping my stuff tidy.

Let’s unpack this package, navigate to the source and execute the installer:

$ tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810.tar.gz
$ ./ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/installer

The installer will check for dependencies and ask where you want to compile REE to. Pretty straight forward and automated task. Using the default path is not required but recommended. It’s more likely to be installed to /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810 as the default.

Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition in your PATH

It will also install RubyGems (the package manager for Ruby) and the most recent Rails version for you. Straight out of the box. However, you will more likely to have stuff to be fixed.

Now you have Ruby Enterprise Edition installed, let’s take a look at your binaries:

$ which ruby
$ which gem

These commands more likely to return the pre-installed Ruby binaries if you have them, OS X Leopard comes with pre-installed Ruby and related binaries.

If you want to use REE as the primary ruby distribution you can set it up in based on your PATH. I’ve created removed the default binaries and created symbolic links to the new binaries.

Note: Removing is OPTIONAL ONLY but it makes sense if you don’t want to mess up your Ruby distribution. Messing up multiple Ruby and Gem instances is a common mistake what people do pretty often.

$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/ruby
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/ruby18
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/gem
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/rake
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/rails
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/rails

Now create the symlinks:

$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/gem /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/rake /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/rails /usr/local/bin/

Now if you check your binaries you should have Ruby Enterprise Edition as the primary package:

$ which ruby
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby
$ which gem
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/gem

Fix and update RubyGems

OK, now you are ready to go. Ruby Enterprise Edition comes with pre-installed gems. Let’s take a look at it:

$ gem list

You will probably see Rails 2.2.2 (or the most recent version) installed as well. You may think you are ready, but actually we still have to fix something:

Rails version 2.2.2 requires RubyGems 1.3.1 – or newer – to be installed. Rails was installed using RubyGems 1.2.0. You can check it yourself:

$ gem -v
1.2.0

I had problems when the RubyGems update was installed after Rails. Don’t worry, we are just about to fix this. Let’s uninstall Rails and its dependencies without a single sign of fear:

$ sudo gem uninstall rails
$ sudo gem uninstall activerecord
$ sudo gem uninstall actionpack
$ sudo gem uninstall activeresource
$ sudo gem uninstall activesupport
$ sudo gem uninstall acionmailer

Now install the RubyGems update:

$ sudo gem install rubygems-update
$ sudo update_rubygems

This will basically update your RubyGems package manager to the most recent version.

NOTE: If the command “update_rubygems” cannot be found in your PATH then go to your gems folder and execute it right there:

$ cd /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.3.1/bin/
$ ./update_rubygems

If you still haven’t succeeded then you can install it explicitly with Ruby:

$ cd /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rubygems-update-1.3.1/
$ ruby setup.rb

Fine, now you should be definitely on version 1.3.1 at least:

$ gem -v
1.3.1

Now let’s install Rails again:

$ sudo gem install rails

Install and set up Passenger with Apache

So you already have Ruby Enterprise Edition with working RubyGems packages such as the most recent Rails version. Now let’s roll on.

There are 2 ways of installing passenger:

• Install the latest official gem release,
• Or you can compile the most recent beta version from source.

REMEMBER: If you are installing these applications on a production server, I’d recommend using the latest official release. As always, you can install Passenger through RubyGems:

$ gem install passenger

Now let’s compile the the Apache module and set up Apache:

$ passenger-install-apache2-module

Just follow the instructions, the installer will locate your web server, compile the module for it and give you some help how to set it up with it. At the end of the installer you will see these 3 lines similar to these:

LoadModule passenger_module /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.0/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.0
PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080810/bin/ruby

Just copy and paste these lines into httpd.conf, and check your configuration and restart Apache:

$ sudo apachectl configtest
Syntax OK
$sudo apachectl restart

Passenger is a great piece of software and it’s pretty easy to be installed as you’ve seen. If you like it, please feel free to donate to Phusion ad get an Enterprise License.

If you are having problems using it, don’t hesitate and post a comment down here, maybe at RailsForum or check out the most common affiliates at the support page.

cat development.log | grep -i "DEPRECATION WARNING"

You may see a lot of deprecation warnings related to the mysql database connector like these:

DEPRECATION WARNING: You’re using the Ruby-based MySQL library that ships with Rails. This library will be REMOVED FROM RAILS 2.2. Please switch to the offical mysql gem: `gem install mysql` See http://www.rubyonrails.org/deprecation for details. (called from mysql_connection at /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:81)

Now you’d better install the mysql gem. I know, it is not a too easy task, a lot of people seem to have problems with it. If you type sudo gem install mysql your Terminal may return with errors:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing mysql:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb install mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lm... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lz... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lsocket... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lnsl... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Yea, very disappointing I know, I know. But rather then start crying like a teenage girl you could check the error log and start thinking about what you are missing.

No, no, no, I am not talking about a million dollar penthouse or girlfriend in this case… You forgot to tell RubyGems where to look for the mysql header/source files. Without them it just cannot build a native extension on your machine.

Let’s provide some more information to the package manager so it will be able to build that beast on your machine:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed mysql-2.7
1 gem installed

Much better.

We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).

.. as it was written yesterday on Techcrunch.

On the other hand, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby On Rails) wrote a post on Loud Thinking (his personal Blog) about the scaling opportunities of the framework.

Well, I am about to dig deeper into this very exciting question and share my experiences.

UPDATE: Just got noticed by Arnold Funken on Twitter:

Update details can be found here.

LoadError (Expected xy file to define ...)

Of course this is a useless error message which means Rails couldn’t find a controller file which has been still at its proper path of course. What to do now? If you need a more detailed error log, there is a solution to force Rails to log errors in deeper detail, just set your caching classes to true in your environment.rb file:

config.cache_classes = true

After restarting the webserver, and reloading the page, I could get a proper and useful error message, Rails pointed that the error is in RMagick gems. Take a quick look on the new error message in the log:

RuntimeError (This version of RMagick was created to run with ImageMagick 6.3.3
but ImageMagick 6.3.6 is installed on this system. You should either
1) Configure and build RMagick for ImageMagick 6.3.6, or
2) download ImageMagick 6.3.3 from file:///usr/local/share/doc/ImageMagick-6.3.3/index.html and install it.
):

Now this is something what you can use to start debugging. After reinstalling RMagick, the problem has been solved, and the site was up and online again. Just do the following 3 easy steps:

gem uninstall rmagick
gem install rmagick
apachectl restart

Done, you can get back processing your images.

Update:

This morning (November 29th) the Rails team has released RC2 so if you are a freak who is keen on the latest builds and wants to check out RC2 – use the svn checkout command of:

svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_2-0-0_RC2 vendor/rails

If I say IDE, I mean a full featured environment with project management, useful editor and debugging features. And this is when Visual Studio comes in. Microsoft’s Visual Studio is one of the most famous IDEs, used by lots of programmers who have to focus on .Net, ASP, C, C++, C#. But what about Ruby developers? Since now it can be used as a Ruby On Rails IDE with a “small extension” built by SapphireSteel Software: Ruby In Steel.

Linking the power of Ruby with the power of Visual Studio

Ruby in Steel is plugging into Visual Studio to blend the benefits of Microsoft’s development environment with Ruby technologies.

A fast debugger is included in the professional edition of Ruby in Steel. IntelliSense functionality for code completion is also done, as it has support for Microsoft’s Solution Explorer project management tool. Ruby in Steel provides an editing environment for Ruby programs and comes with syntax coloring and the ability to run console applications with one single keystroke.

Among the other features planned for Ruby in Steel, wizards set up databases. Ruby In Steel supports the MySQL and SQL Server databases, with integrations planned for other databases such as Oracle. Ruby in Steel enables development of applications to be deployed primarily on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

There are good news for the upcoming version of Visual Studio: Ruby in Steel is going to support Visual Studio 2008 as well as version 2005 (latest available yet).

Ruby In Steel comes with lots of features in different cases:

• Code Coloring (Ruby and RHTML)
• Code Folding (Ruby and RHTML)
• Extended Syntax Coloring
• Mark and Hide Selected Code
• Tooltips show hidden (collapsed) code
• Collapse To Definitions
• Bracket matching (move cursor)
• Bracket highlighting
• Keyword..END matching (move cursor)
• Block comment/uncomment
• Multi-level undo/redo
• Tabbed (multi-file) editing
• Split-window editing
• Auto Indent/outdent
• Bookmarks
• Line Numbers (optional)
• User defined macros
• Find/Replace with wildcards
• Find/Replace with regular expressions
• Find/Replace in files
• Incremental Search
• Rectangular block Selection
• Drag and drop copy/move
• Block Indenting
• Smart Indenting
• Format all code or selection

Debugging features

• Ruby and Rails Debugging
• Breakpoints with Breakpoint Manager (enable/disable)
• Watch variables
• Show Locals and/or Globals
• Show Instance Variables
• Show Object Methods
• Show Singleton Methods
• Call Stack
• Step into / over
• Run to cursor
• Interactive Debugging Console
• Drill-down (variable expansion)
• Hovering Drill-down in Ruby Editor (or in Ruby Console)
• Fast ‘Cylon’ Debugger

IntelliSense

• Intelligent Type Inference
• Optional type assertion of method return
• Optional type assertion of arguments
• Member, Keyword and Parameter completion lists
• Globals completion
• Variables completion
• Auto-expand snippets
• Auto-surround snippets
• RDoc display in tooltips
• tooltip HELP OVER COMPLETION LISTS
• Navigation bars (drop-down Lists) In EDitor

Note: Using IntelliSense is a convenient way to access descriptions of functions, particularly their parameter lists. It speeds up software development by reducing the amount of keyboard input required. It also allows less reference to external documentation as documentation on many functions appears with the function name. Since now with the power of Ruby In Steel we have the opportunity to use Ruby and Ruby on Rails functions, attribute, etc. with IntelliSense.
More can be found on the relevant Wikipedia page.

Project Management

• Ruby and Rails Project Wizard
• Manage Projects in Solution Explorer
• Add New Ruby and Rails files
• Add Existing Ruby and Rails files
• Optionally exclude hidden files/folders
• Optionally exclude by file extension
• Synchronize disk/project
• Show All Files
• Add project folders
• Open command prompt in directory
• Rename file/folder
• Delete file/folder
• Drag+drop copy/move file/folder
• Exclude selected file/folder
• Projects may include supported VS file types: HTML, text, CSS, XML etc.
• File properties (args, flags etc.)
• Import existing Ruby or Rails projects
• Convert (in Place) Ruby or Rails projects

Productivity Tools

• Rake Task Runner
• Dockable/configurable Rake Window
• Start server dialog
• Generate controller/model/scaffold
• Dockable Generate Script-Builder
• Install Gems dialog
• Ruby and Rails toolbar
• Run in popup command window
• Run in integrated interactive console
• Tabbed/docked/floating windows
• Build to find syntax errors
• Click message to locate syntax error
• Comprehensive PDF User Guide/Manual
• PDF guides to macros, LightTPD, Snippets
• Integrated Help
• Go To Definition
• Syntax error indicators (‘squigglies’)
• Ruby/Rails Macro Library
• Ruby Snippet Library
• Ruby Snippet Editor
• Ruby Explorer code navigator

Rails Development

• Database setup wizard
• Automated MySQL setup
• Automated SQL Server setup
• Option to use other DB servers
• Auto-generate YAML
• Integrated SQL Server DB definition
• Integrated SQL Server Explorer
• Integrated web browser
• IntelliSense For Rails
• RHTML/HTML Editor TOGGLE
• One-click Rails Debugger

Different versions with different pricing

Ruby In Steel comes in two different versions: Personal and Developer edition. The first one is free but has a few restrictions – for example there is no IntelliSense support. The developer edition has all the features what a professional programmer needs. See the official website to compare the different versions an check out the movies.

I’ve been using the personal edition for a while and I can say it is very useful, it is very strong in productivity features and it is the best solution for Ruby On Rails development. I’m planning to buy the developer version which is now available only for $199 which doesn’t seem to be too expensive (more productivity means more money to earn )

I also have to mention that one of the features that web developers will really like with VS 2008 is its built-in support for JavaScript IntelliSense. This is enabled in both the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition as well as in Visual Studio, and makes using JavaScript and building AJAX applications significantly easier. Microsoft also announced the next version of Visual Studio (right after VS 2008) which will have project management supports as well.

Related links:

• SapphireSteel (Home of Ruby In Steel)
• Visual Studio Developer Center (Official Visual Studio 2005 website)
• Visual Studio 2008 (upcoming version, codename Orcas) website