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Thin: A Ruby HTTP Daemon That’s Faster Than Mongrel

Thin is a new Web server / daemon written in Ruby by Marc-André Cournoyer that uses the EventMachine, Rack, and Mongrel libraries. EventMachine makes it super fast at processing network I/O, Rack makes it easy to integrate with existing Ruby Web app frameworks, and Mongrel helps it parse HTTP. So, yes, the title is slightly misleading. Thin actually relies on Mongrel, but is ultimately faster than it, even against Mongrel’s EventMachine-enhanced guise.

You can get started with Thin with a simple sudo gem install thin and then you can use it with any Rack supporting Web app / framework. With a Rails app, for example, a simple thin start in the base directory will get things moving.

Startrek.com Shutting Down

Oh my! Bad news! Startrek.com is shutting down! I’ve been around Startrek.com quite often to check up on my favourite characters and learn more about the great Star Trek universe. If there is an online petition to keep the site up and running, I’d sign it!

Curlsman writes to let us know that the fan site startrek.com, operated for 13 years by CBS, is being shut down and its staff laid off. Is this site worth a write-in campaign? From the (perhaps final) post: "Goodbye from the STARTREK.COM Team. Sadly, we must report that CBS Interactive organization is being restructured, and the production team that brings you the STARTREK.COM site has been eliminated. Effective immediately. We don't know the ultimate fate of this site, which has served millions of Star Trek fans for the last thirteen years. If you have comments, please send them to editor @ startrek.com — we hope someone at CBS will read them.

RSpec 1.1 Released: Now Supports Rails 2.0

The team behind RSpec, a Behavior-Driven Development based “testing” library, have announced the release of RSpec 1.1.0. This will be of particular interest to Rails 2.0 developers as support has now been added, along with interoperability with Test::Unit. RSpec 1.1 also includes a Rails tool called “RailsStory” that allows you write “user stories” that can be tested out on the fly.

phpBB 3.0 has been released!

Close to 6 years after the release of phpBB 2.0, we are given a new version which includes an enormous number of new features, tightened security, extensive bug fixes, optimisation for mobile devices and search engines, and remains free under the GPL.

You can view the feature changes from 2.0 to 3.0 here. Most notable changes include the removal of MS Access for data storage (who would want that anyway!), syntax highlighting, a lot of security improvement, caching, also a lot of user-centered features.

If the default phpBB 3.0 package contains all the features you need, go ahead. The biggest features missing is plugins or add-ons, whatever you want to call it. You still have the ability to add MOD’s, which are basically hacks to your phpBB codebase. I don’t mind hacking some code and getting my hands dirty, but every time there’s an upgrade, you get into trouble. You need re-apply all the MODs your site relies on.

In all, I think phpBB 3.0 is quite a nice package to replace the famous, but leaky phpBB 2.0 forum tool, but it just isn’t quite there yet. My recommendation would, at this moment be Vanilla. If you have any other kick-ass forum solution, feel free to drop a comment here.

Flickr Adds Stats To Photo Pro Accounts

Flickr has provided an attractive place to show off your photos and get constructive feedback from the community. However, their advanced comment and tagging system leaves out the vast number of people that simply peruse the site. But today Flickr unlocked those stats for Pro users.

Earlier this year Flickr whetted our appetite for stats when they released numbers on what kinds of cameras are used on the site. The stats are like Google Analytics for your photos. They track page views and visitors across each of your photos and go all the way back to the start of your pro account (or at least 28 days back if you upgrade from a free account).

The numbers are updated daily and don’t count views you make yourself or that are from embedded versions of your images around the web. Referrals are only listed for the past couple of weeks. For search engine referrals, stats will show what people searched for to find your pictures.

Installing and Configuring Nginx and Rails on Ubuntu

James O’Kelly has put together a comprehensive tutorial going through all of the stages necessary to install and configure Nginx and Rails together to run applications on an Ubuntu server. James’ blog RailsJitsu.com is definitely worth a look (and perhaps to subscribe to!) as he seems to have a knack for regularly putting together good Rails (and especially Mephisto) focused posts.

Faker: Quick “Fake Data” Generation in Ruby

I love finding a library that does exactly what it claims to do, and does it in the simplest way possible. Faker by Ben Curtis is a Ruby library, packaged as a Ruby Gem, that generates “fake data” for you, in the form of names, telephone number, e-mail addresses, addresses, and so forth.

For example:

Faker::Name.name  # => "Gwendolyn Wehner"
Faker::Internet.email # => "ava.conn@emmerich.info"
Faker::Internet.free_email # => "angelina.labadie@hotmail.com"
Faker::Internet.user_name # => "mitchel.heaney"

This could be particularly useful for throwing data at any libraries or systems you develop that need to process personal details.

I had trouble installing Faker in the usual way (with gem install faker) as the Ruby Gems server reports that the file could not be found. An easy workaround, for now, is to download the gem manually:

wget http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/faker-0.2.0.gem
gem install faker

Fresh New Ruby Implementation Benchmarks: So Who’s Fastest?

Almost a year ago, Antonio Cangiano performed some benchmarks on the then present Ruby implementations: Ruby 1.8.5, YARV (now Ruby 1.9), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal. The results were that YARV, although nowhere near ready for production use, was streets ahead of Ruby 1.8, and the other implementations raised enough errors to still be considered ‘experimental’.

Now Antonio has rerun the tests on Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.9 (from trunk), JRuby (from trunk), Rubinius (from trunk) and XRuby 0.3.2. Ruby 1.9 again takes the lead by quite a margin, but the best development is that instead of being a distant third (behind Ruby 1.8), JRuby has made significant improvements and is smack bang in between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 in terms of performance (while offering, of course, the benefits of the Java ecosystem). JRuby now also passes all of the tests without error, a feat that even Ruby 1.9 doesn’t yet achieve. The Rubinius team hasn’t been slacking either. On the previous test, Rubinius was coming in miles behind the other implementations, but is now quicker than the stock Ruby 1.8.6 interpreter on a wide selection of the tests.

Antonio’s post is blog pornography for those of us who are into benchmarks, comparisons, and graphs, so just go soak it all up now.

First Beta of Firefox 3 Now Available

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is based on the new Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 27 months and includes nearly 2 million lines of code changes, fixing more than 11,000 issues. Gecko 1.9 includes some major re-architecting for performance, stability, correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.

Read more at http://digg.com/software/First_Beta_of_Firefox_3_Now_Available