nachricht an mich selbst: morgen frueh nochmal "quick wins with mysql" lesen und den eigenen mysql-server ueberpruefen.

rubyworks is a full rails stack put together also by thoughtworks. this time it’s all open source. it features haproxy (supposed to be much faster and light weight than apache_mod_balancer) as load balancer, mongrel as application server, monit and runit for monitoring and controlling mongrel, mysql/postgrs/oracle ruby bindings for database connectivity and also bindings for ferret, libxml, hpricot and rmagick.

everything is nicely packaged as rpms and debian packages so it can easily be installed within 5 minutes (it really works). even better, the packages at the same time pretend to be ruby gems, so you can safely install other debian packages *and* gems that depend on one of the libraries provided by rubyworks.

now we had already set up a cluster of 6 servers for autoki with everything set up more or less perfectly so why would we need rubyworks? answer: to steal the config files for runit/monit and haproxy. our mongrel setup has always been a bit shaky, especially when it came to restarting the mongrels after a deployment. after using the rubyworks setup with runit now everything is stable. (btw runit can run and supervise any process in *nix and is ready to be the successor of the old init which is used by most linux distros to start up all the processes. one advantage is that it starts all processes at once instead of piece by piece, plus runit handles putting a process in the background and keeping it alive there, something mongrel is especially bad at).

Mingle is the new agile project management tool from thoughtworks studios. it’s not open source but it’s free for up to five users – sounds like a fair offer to me. for everyone who thinks differently – it’s written in ruby and deployed using jruby, but the class file decompiler is part of the jdk. i wonder how long they can actually make people pay for it. hello open source business models?

anyway, when thilo installed mingle from one of the cds given out to all conference attendees we first were a bit disappointed. after the installation you basically get a nice looking but totally empty screen leaving you with not much more than a big question mark over your head. we didn’t have much time then so that was it for mingle until i attended the corresponding session where things got a bit clearer: mingle is a completely customizable tool. the only thing that’s hard coded are users and cards/stories/tickets/you-name-it and that everything is a wiki page – the rest is up to you. the main features are these:

• define your own attributes for your cards: you can add new attributes to your cards and in place edit all of them – auto complete shows you a list of values that have been entered into that field before
• filter cards by any combination of attributes and save the filter, after which you can add it as a tab on the top
• card transitions – create a set of transitions where a card with a specific state can be transitioned to another state, e.g. from status open to status accepted and assigned to a person. this enables the project team to map their work flows into mingle
• create graphs and tables from the cards – multiple graph types are supported for easy tracking of iteration progress or number of bugs etc.
• project templates – so you don’t have to sit in front of a blank screen as we did

mingle looks like it could become a really cool tool. after all, trac is getting a bit boring after all these years(?) and we’ve actually stopped using its ticketing system, because it wasn’t easy enough to change it to our needs.

Last week was RailsConf 2007 in Berlin. Only a couple of days have passed and it already seems so far away. Time for some blogging before everybody forgets that it even took place and nobody’s going to read this So here’s the interesting part of the sessions I attended:

A Half-day of Behavior-driven Development on Rails (rspec)

This was the first session on tutorial day and for me one of the most interesting. It basically gave a looong introduction to behavior driven design, how it evolved from things like TDD and who realized what while enganged in which project back in the good old times. One of the interesting parts for me was when they talked about the whole story writing/specification process. I had heard most of it before but it was a good refreshment. The central statement was to write “Software that matters”, and to achieve this, you’d have to get the specs right – as we XPers know this should be done by collecting user stories. The suggested format for such a story was this:

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Hier wie versprochen die Slides meiner Presentation zum Thema mocha bei der Ruby User Group Berlin.

Links:

Mocha
Floehopper (Blog des Mocha Entwicklers)
Presentation about Ruby Mocks
TestingRails Blog (gelöscht )
Use stubs and mocks to convey intent
Ruby: Mocks and Stubs using Mocha

Open Source ist wirklich eine tolle Sache, jeder kann den Code für seine Zwecke anpassen. Das haben wir auch schon ein paar mal gemacht, hier kommt noch einen schönes Beispiel welches für Open Source spricht.

Wir haben viele kleine thumbnails auf der Startseite von autoki, die haben wir genauso wie alle anderen Formate mit file_column generiert. file_column ist ein praktisches Plugin das eine Schnittstelle über RMagick zu ImageMagick bildet, um einfach verschiedene Formate von Bildern für ein Model zu generieren. Vor Kurzen mussten wir feststellen, dass die autoki Startseite ungewöhnlich viel Bandbreite braucht. Beim Blick auf ein einzelnes Thumbnail zeigte sich, das bereits ein kleines 53×53 Pixel Jpeg 48KB gross ist.
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