Mountain West Ruby Conference

Salt Lake City, UT - Mar 16-17, 2007

Jeff Barczewski

MasterView project founder
Inspired Horizons Trainer / Mentor

jeffb at inspiredhorizons dot com

Press the key 't' to toggle into Handout mode vs Slide mode

Mountain West Ruby Conference 2007

• Salt Lake City Library Auditorium (Friday & Saturday)
• 150 people (with 150 laptops)
• Wireless and wired networking
• Power strips
• Synchronized video and screen

Overview 1/2

Overview 2/2

Ruby Queue - Ara T. Howard 1/4

• Ara works for NOAA and writes ruby utilities for managing terabytes of satellite data that comes in around the clock
• Ara open sources the code he develops and you can find it at http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/
• NOAA runs large clusters of linux servers to process the data. The satellite data feed comes from very old hardware and needs lots of cleanup.
• Ara also writes utilities to identify signifigant patterns in the data
• http://codeforpeople.com/presentations/mwrc/slideshow/

Ruby Queue - Ara T. Howard 2/4

• Visual example of data
• For Hurricane Katrina NOAA was asked to find the power outages so they had to process a terabyte of data
• Katrina data 1
  
• Katrina outages
• Ruby Queue Architecture
• NFS is commonly used for shared processing, but there were issues with locking, caching, single point of failure
• Created gem posixlock and lockfile to help with locking

Ruby Queue - Ara T. Howard 3/4

• Uses sqlite (Jamis Buck), the simple sql db written in C, beats the pants off pstore, fsdb, madeline, ... It is very robust. Jamis flushes writes to disk frequently so nothing is lost in a failure.
  
• Ruby Queue (rq) is designed to be a simple worker queue which can be run on standard posix operating systems with Ruby on normal user level accounts. 
• Nothing tricky has to be installed. They connect to the db to get the work. 
• Uses yml for in/out. 
• LVM kills raid perf (so don't use). 

Ruby Queue - Ara T. Howard 4/4

• rq q create
• rq q submit COMMAND
• rq q feed
• rq q cron start # user space daemons which will restart if server rebooted
• World map showing lighting at night
• Derived population in poverty

Community driven development - Gregory Brown 1/3

• Ruport - reporting for Ruby
• Ruby community is growing, identity is forming, needs us to shape
• Licenses (GPL, BSD, MIT) - Holy war
• BSD/MIT favors individuals
• GPL favors communities but excludes many users
• LoR (License of Ruby) takes a little of both (GPL + BSD)

Community driven development - Gregory Brown 2/3

• Communities are idea warehouses
• Tons of bad ideas but some good ones
• Don't try to do everything for everyone, focus on your issues that you can work passionately about. You don't have the background to do everything.
• Sometimes less is more (compare Ruby api's to Java api's)
• svn/trac is better for tracking changes than gforge (Rubyforge) but can use svk+cron to mirror to Rubyforge
• Every patch is valueable, even if not in scope. Can make examples, addins.

Community driven development - Gregory Brown 3/3

• Put vision out for people to see
• Use cases drive development, resist putting things in unless specific need
• Create a how to file a bug report document, for Ruport that almost immediately spawned activity
• Free O'Reilly book online - Producing open source software - Karl Fogel
• Pragmatic Community Driven Development slides

Simple Bayesian Networks with Ruby - Carl Youngblood

• Carl exmplained the theory behind Bayesian networks and how they are trained
• Used for spam filters and many other prediction
• Carl is part of the confreaks.com which offers video taping and other conference related services including wifi and networking
  

Ruby Implementers Panel

• John Lam - Ruby CLR
• Thomas Enebo, Charles Nutter - JRuby
• Evan Phoenix - Rubinous (Ruby in Ruby)
• Kevin Tew - Parrot (Perl VM)
• Exciting times, cross learning and working together, similar ideas, Ruby tests and specs are coming out of the shared work. Ruby developers will have many choices.

MasterView Evolution - Jeff Barczewski 1/2

• MasterView Evolution slides 
• MasterView site
• Discussed the thought process, approach, bringing idea to STL Ruby for refinement
• Evolution and refactoring (TDD rocks, revamped for teams, new IO, DSL)
• Demonstration of MasterView 

MasterView Evolution - Jeff Barczewski 2/2

Future Directions

• REST scaffold generator
• Directive upload / community site, wiki
• Power directives (grid, ajax grid, calendar widgets, address widgets, nav menus, ...) Much of the power of components without the fat.
• Themes, Non-evaling / sandboxed templates
• DB loaded templates, Reverse engineering rhtml into MV
• Mongrel + ERB, Nitro integration

Black-boxing with Ruby - James Britt 1/2

• Interacting with some other app or lib or process that may not have your particular interests in mind (batch oriented, easy to use, mining)
  
• Wanted a project tracking tool, comment system, but liked some stuff that wasn't Ruby (Trac, WordPress, Amazon EC2, CafePress shops)
• Building everything yourself is insane
• Tracula - uses Hpricot & Mechanize with Rake for simple ticket integration into Trac
• Lesson learned - if it's on the web it has an API (but can be fragile), Hpricot &Mechanize work well. Future proof - if change backend, keep same scripts
• Black-boxing with Ruby slides

Black-boxing with Ruby - James Britt 2/2

• Comet - Commenting system for publishing. Create or fetch (x)html, feed into element processor, add in needed scripting, write out new pages (Illustration)
• Usable with any website... sort of
• Lessons learned: WordPress (PHP) is easy to hack, but plugins are the way to go, repurposing OPC can bite you hard. Interesting progress and spin-offs.
• Screen scraping, DOM munging, and proxies!
• Observations: Most sites offering real web API, proxies buffer API changes, proxies afford decoupling (it's like OOP)
• Goals: clean Ruby API for your code, robust exception handling, avoiding tool lock-in 

Lightening Talks

• Wax - CMS built-in, Rails like framework
• Goldberg - generator for Rails to provide authentication, basic CMS, menu editors, roles/permissions, and admin screens to maintain
• CruiseControl.rb - continuous source integration (Thoughtworks)
• Rails Integration (JRuby) - deploy Rails app as WAR
• LogWatchR - Pat Eyler uses to watch server log files (aggregates logging for 3000 boxes to central machine for operation notification, 2280 log entries/second

Keynote: We've won, now what? - Chad Fowler 1/4

• Ruby popularity growing, indexes indicate faster growth than competing tech, jobs growing
• Winning means
• Not having to do something besides Ruby
• Sun, Microsoft all getting in the game
• World culture is about fighting all the time, so we continue to fight even though we should be shifting to a new paradigm
• We should stop defending and reacting to terrorism (stuff you can't prove, like it doesn't scale) and we should be honest and fix any short comings. Don't hide the warts. Be proactive.

Keynote:We've won, now what? - Chad Fowler 2/4

• Spent time in India, saw first hand the offshore capabilities
• Paul Graham - "Why would I offshore when I can use Ruby with one (local) developer rather than ten offshore developers"
• Ruby / Rails different communities, melting pot
• Tendancy to become a big corporate beauracracy, stamping out new ideas. Need to revisit some heresies (IBM in the 80's, Barnes & Noble)
• Equated to being in suburbia

Keynote:We've won, now what? - Chad Fowler 3/4

• South Indian Monkey trap
• Need to make it easy for community to contribute and participate
• Build things in a way to accept change easily
• Communities are built by individuals, but the scary thing is that individuals are shaped by communities

Keynote:We've won, now what? - Chad Fowler 4/4

• Find ways to lead
• Write next killer app, plugin. Innovate
• Diversify - build your knowledge portfolio (erlang, haskell, ocaml)
• If you aren't uncertain then you aren't growing

Ruby CLR and Ruby.NET - John Lam

• MS is actively working on dynamica languages including Ruby
• John couldn't discuss the details, but mentioned big things are coming this year
• Mentioned announcments would come in April and more at Develper conference in fall

Ruby USB - Michael Hewner

• Library which exposes all of the available info for a USB device
• Created a USB controllable remote control

JRuby - Charles Nutter & Thomas Enebo

Why does Ruby need JRuby?

• Native threads
• Better internationalization
• Speed (current interpretted averaging 50% of MRI, compiled runs 2X, normal hotspot optimization is believed to be biggest gain once they feed the right info into it)
• Better garbage collection
• Deployment capabilities for clusters, monitoring