Braid 0.4

Braid 0.4 has been released, Braid is a simple tool to help track git and svn vendor branches in a git repository. I had a previous coverage of Braid 0.3.

The new features include squashed mode, in which you have only one commit when adding a mirror instead of having all the history and a team mode. It also requires Git version 1.5.4.5 or higher (see my post on updating git). If you hit any bug please report them.

The wiki has usage and examples. You can install it with rubygems (don’t forget to upgrade to RubyGems 1.1.1):

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com/
gem install evilchelu-braid

Or you can get it from the Git repository.

If you used my previous Braid tutorial here’s how to upgrade Rspec to the git repository and get the latest version. If you do not have rspec svn setup you can skip this part.

braid remove vendor/plugins/rspec
braid remove vendor/plugins/rspec_on_rails
git merge braid/track

I think I hit a bug and had to delete the folders manually:

 rm -rf vendor/plugins/rspec vendor/plugins/rspec_on_rails

Now to install the git repositories:

braid add -p -t git git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git
braid add -p -t git git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git
git merge braid/track

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JRuby on Rails deployed at Sun

Sun’s Mediacast 2.0 was rewritten using JRuby on Rails. It’s another successful deployment of JRuby after Oracle Mix (see implementation details).

Our development environment is based on a self-contained JRuby (1.0.3) on Rails (1.2.6) application stored in a Mercurial repository. The IDE we use is NetBeans 6 with Ruby support and Mercurial plugin. The DB of our choice is MySQL and servers we use during development are WEBrick and Glassfish v2ur1.

As for production environment they use “a pair of load-balanced T2000 with Solaris 10, JDK6 and SJSAS 9.1u1. These two servers share a nfs NAS drive used for file storage and fragment cache storage. The DB backend is a MySQL database server, which we access through a connection pool set up in the app server.”

They comment that most C-based ruby gems are not compatible with JRuby but the support is improving with the work of jruby-extras project. They used Java for SOAP-over-HTTPS based authentication webservice and for long-running processes by using a servlet filter.

JRuby is starting to enter the enterprise space, dominated by Java. Sun is investing much in Ruby by supporting the JRuby project, JRuby in Glassfish and NetBeans Ruby support. I think the number of JRuby-powered applications will increase this year and Ruby be considered a serious language.

Going at Wurbe #5

Monday I went to a meeting of Bucharest web developers called Wurbe (web urbe). The topic was Testing: Unit-testing, TDD, BDD.

Octavian Costache (Vivi) held a very nice speech about why it is good to test and very important how unit testing will improve your sex life (but mainly your code). He succeeded convincing me and started writing more tests.

Other interesting talks were Cosmin Lehene’s talk about TDD, Adrian Spinei about testing webapps in windows where he demoed testing Gmail using WatiN, Mihai Bulhac about using Watir, Bogdan Roman with Selenium and Cristi Balan and Sergiu Truta with RSpec and respectively RSpec stories.

All in all it was very interesting to find out why it is good to test and that most major companies use it. It seems that TDD is indeed proving useful. I actually improved my unit tests and really take care about code coverage. You can view the slides on wurbe website (most of them are in english).

Ruby 1.9 Released

The new version of Ruby, 1.9 was recently released (please note that it’s a development version). You can download the packages.

Amongst the hundreds of changes the most important one is the new VM (YARV) that according to some benchmarks drastically increases performance of Ruby. Now I’m waiting for Rails and Mongrel to be compatible.

Happy Holidays Rubyists !

Intype 0.2.1 and Intype Project Manager

Intype is a code editor for Windows that mimics TextMate (they say it’s not a clone or port of TextMate but bundles are compatibles). It supports (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby (including Ruby on Rails & RHTML), PHP (including CakePHP), Python, Java, C, C++, Lua, Smarty, Markdown, Textile, Twiki, XML, YAML, and more are coming.

Intype is new and it’s just in Alpha state and recently version 0.2.1 was released that offers undo/redo and drag&drop. It curently lacks tabs but I think they will be introduced in the next version because it’s the more requested feature. It also adds Perl, Python, YAML bundles and new snippets for the C bundle.

I use Intype with Ruby on Rails development because bundles speeds up writing a lot and it’s the best replacement for TextMate (I wish I had a Mac). I still evaluate it and RadRails but I think I’ll go with Intype because it’s faster and smaller.

Speaking of tabs a user made Intype Project Manager that acts as placeholder for Intype windows, has a file browser and support tabs.