Expecting Rain

• Lawmakers complain that Google 'gamed' auction | InfoWorld | News | 2008-04-15 |


• MySQL upgrade now slated for June, Sun says | InfoWorld | News | 2008-04-15 |
  (tagged as: mysql)


• CEO Calls MySQL the Ferrari of Databases
  (tagged as: mysql)


• Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity: Connecting languages (or polyglot programming example 1)
  (tagged as: erlang ruby)


• Curl moves to take on Adobe Air in offline RIA business | InfoWorld | News | 2008-04-14 |

Wow, the Java/Groovy request is really gaining momentum over on the Google App Engine Issue list. This is now the number 1 request with the Ruby request ranking 2nd. Perl, an early leader has really dropped today coming now in 4th place.

I have no idea why this fascinates me so, but it really does. Perhaps it gives me a touch on the pulse of desired programming languages in this realm.

It isn't a surprise to me that at this writing Ruby is the number 1 user requested feature on the Google App Engine Feature/Issue tracker.

Whether or not Ruby has the largest user base for this type of environment or just the loudest is hard to determine. I've starred the Ruby feature as well as the Erlang request, which isn't doing very well. As I mentioned earlier (felt like that was a play on words with Erlang) I expect Ruby to be one of the first if not the first language brought on. As well, I just don't think that Erlang for the reasons using their processes will be brought into the stack.

If Erlang is made available, I can only think it will be a very stripped down version that lacks most of what make Erlang relevant to me. I don't have a problem with this as the theory is that App Engine is handling what I would have to code for in Erlang anyway.

If you feel passionately about a particular language or feature for App Engine, head over to the issue tracker and make your vote known. There is no guarantee that these issues will be granted by Google, but I can't help but think that they will be seriously considered if enough people are voting for them.

I will more than likely send out another link roundup today, this includes yesterday afternoon's findings. The highlight of today's links has to be the Joe Armstrong interview. I thought it was well done and very interesting.

Our second Ruby project that I spoke of has been progressing quite nicely, here are the stats for this second project.

Line Count Stats

Line count for src......    1796
Line count for proc.....       9
Line count for util.....     256
Line count for unit.....    3095
Line count for web......    7428
Line count for misc.....     198
--------------------------------
Total...................   12782

Started
............................
Finished in 19.257698 seconds.

79 tests, 1669 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

Wow, it has been a very busy month since I've posted last. I've not posting in a long time and I'm going to try to rectify that.

Project Update:
Our Ruby project is going well. So well in fact that we have begun another project using the same framework. I'm very excited.

Today is my last day at work for the year, I'm taking the remainder off and enjoying time with my family. I won't however, stop developing, I've got a little project I'm doing for my family that I'm going to try to wrap up.

Due to our hectic schedule and the low priority this project has, we're not exactly burning up the keyboard coding it, but we are having fun.

Code count:

Line count for src......     484
Line count for proc.....       9
Line count for util.....     176
Line count for unit.....     376
Line count for web......       9
Line count for misc.....     153
--------------------------------
Total...................    1207

Started
.....................
Finished in 0.661805 seconds.

21 tests, 107 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm working on a project using ruby. Here are the line count stats as of this afternoon:

Line count for src......     305
Line count for proc.....       9
Line count for util.....     176
Line count for unit.....     235
Line count for web......       9
Line count for misc.....     147
--------------------------------
Total...................     881

Here are the unit test stats:

Started
.............
Finished in 0.192702 seconds.

13 tests, 56 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

So far, so good.

Gruff is a very simple graphing library for Ruby. It creates very simple, clean graphs with very little coding. I've been searching for something like this for quite sometime now.

Here is a sample graph of the hours per week logged on a project I'm working on along with 2 other employees:


Check out the Gruff sample gallery (link)


Note: Gruff is easy to install, but the required dependancies were quite tricky. I was warned on the dependancies websites that it wasn't easy, but being cocky as I am, I went ahead and ignored them and tried to figure it out myself. Many hours later, I found myself reading the instructsions found at http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/install-osx.html which then worked. One problem I ran into however was that I had to uninstall what I had already tried by running "make uninstall" from the various libraries I already tried to install :)

It has been a while since I've written about the Ruby project we are undertaking here. Reporting its progress has been lost in the shuffle of writing about bugs and other things.

The project is going well. We're adapting to some of the smaller things about Ruby such as adopting naming conventions (http://wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/RubyStyleGuide), RDoc, and most importantly unit testing. I feel we are writing very clean code right now. It seems that with Ruby you can focus more on the task at hand and proper algorithms rather than language semantics.

I'm very pleased.

I've been rather silent the last few days. With good reason, I've been dealing with a crazy bug in a piece of software our group wrote. The application is 400,000 lines of code long.

Many times as I've searched for bugs in code I get to the point where I think it is 3rd party software only to be proven wrong -- that it is my software. It's always embarrassing when I make the statement that it isn't my problem, but someone else's only to be wrong. Once again, I believe the problem is elsewhere.

Here is the scenario. We have an application which makes many requests to a REST styled web service. We have many clients who run this application. We have noticed that randomly one client will get another client's response. It doesn't happen often, it isn't hardly noticeable, but it is wrong. We are using Tomcat as our web server, our web service is powered by a servlet which I believe isn't handling concurrent requests. To test this, I created a simplified version of our servlet. I pass two parameters to this service, a client id and a random string. The servlet then does a MD5 hash of that string and passes it back along with the client id and the original random string. I'm basically just doing some processing to take up a cpu cycle or two. I have a client with creates 8 different threads, each with their own client id. I then begin make a huge number of requests to the servlet and check to make sure the response's client id matches the requester's client id. It fails after about 1000 requests.

I'll keep looking through this problem and see if I can find a solution.

As a side note, I have the same "servlet" running as a ruby cgi script, it does the same thing, being ran from my same client. I'm at my 16000 request without an error...

Once again, I feel rather sheepish about my lack of knowledge regarding a new language. I just don't know the available resources as well as I should. I spent a good bit of time this morning looking for a Ruby email parsing class. The usual search methods weren't turning up any good results and I was left contemplating writing my own. Then I stumbled onto the website RAA - Ruby Application Archive. What a wonderful site, it is a repository of ruby classes for every imaginable use. It has a great navigational system of possible libraries with sub category names -- in no time flat I was looking at a list of 14 relevant libraries. I chose to go with rubymail by Matt Armstrong.

I guess what I've learned from this is that different languages have a core set of essential resource websites that it is worth finding, bookmarking, and utilizing. This is obviously one for Ruby.

We're beginning our official coding for our Ruby web app. Here is our setup:

• Language - Ruby version 1.8.4
  
• IDE - eclipse
  
• Source Control - CVS
  
• DB - MySQL v5.0.24
  
• Web Server - Apache 2.2.3
  
• CGI - Mod Ruby 1.2.6*
  
• Build - Ant
  

Myself and one other employee will be working about 1 hour per day on this project and we're both quite excited.

Total lines of code so far: 76

*We chose Mod Ruby over FastCGI and Mongrel due to the fact that although this is a popular application we are running, the number of users are limited and we were curious as to how well it would work. We do have FastCGI installed in case we need to revert.

I was doing some research on unit testing with Ruby when I stumbled onto a great article. It impressed me not for the information presenting on unit testing, but rather the approach to learning a new language.

Quote:

But it was at that very moment when I asked Ruby a question and it responded with the answer that I learned more than Ruby. I knew right then that I didn't want to run the example just once. No, I wanted to preserve the example and ultimately build a Ruby knowledge base that I could draw from later. That meant the examples had to be executable and check their own results. That sounded familiar. I needed to write tests.

This is potentially quite useful. Often times, I search and search for a way to do something, do it, and forget about it until I find myself searching for it again. If when I found something I put it into a central repository, I could find it much easier in theory.

Source: Ruby Learning Test #1: Are You There, World?

In hindsight, it is rather humorous the time one may spend trying to learn how to do the simplest of things programmatically. While it is happening, it can be the most frustrating experience you've had.

As noted earlier, we are working on a web app here at work using Ruby. This project is going to not be using the Ruby on Rails framework. It is going to be a series of web services developed with Ruby and a few Ajax enabled web pages that call and use these services.

Prior to starting this project I worked with the Ruby MySQL module found here and determined that it was impossible to call stored procedures using it. Yesterday, I stumbled across an article from Planet MySQL showing how wrong I was, it is possible. They displayed the following code:

dbh=Mysql.init
dbh.real_connect("127.0.0.1", "root", "secret", "prod",3306,nil,Mysql::CLIENT_MULTI_RESULTS)


which fixed the problem completely. They explained:

If you try to call a stored procedure that returns a result set, you'll at first get a "procedure foo() can't return a result set in the given context error". This is because the CLIENT_MULTI_RESULTS flag is not set by default when the connection is created

Such is the frustration of learning a new language, you aren't aware of all of the little nuances that are used to make it work well.

That being said, I'm still very excited about using the Ruby language. It is going well!

Selecting a programming language is quite a process with lasting effects. Here where I work, we currently use Java. I enjoy it despite some of the bad press it is getting lately. It has great tools, great support, and great documentation. I do however, wish I was programming in something different -- Ruby. Unfortunately, we are so invested in our infrastructure and training that it becomes quite a task to change.

We have a few Ruby evangelists here including myself and we are making a bit of noise. We are about to do a rewrite of a highly used but simple web app here in the next couple months, our trouble ticket program. We will be doing it as a proof of concept as well as the needed upgrade it will be. Hopefully, everything will go very smoothly and we'll be well on our way to adopting a new standard language for a our department.

Yahoo! has just release a Developer Center for Ruby development. While I mainly do my development in Java, I prefer Ruby. I really enjoy it as a language, not just the benefits the Rails framework provides.

This is pretty exciting to me.

Anyway, the Yahoo! Developer Network - Ruby Developer Center can be found here.