For the last couple of months I’ve spent a little time each week with the OpenSolaris team at Sun, putting together an Amazon EC2 image that makes it easy to deploy and experiment with Ruby on Rails.
They released the AMI last Friday, but I’ve been too crazy busy to make an announcement. Here’s the official word, and here’s my take on it …
My goal with this project was to help people get a Rails app running as quickly as possible. We set up this AMI so that you can get your hands dirty with Rails if you don’t want to spend the time installing everything on your home system or server, and it’s an inexpensive and easy introduction to OpenSolaris if you’re curious.
All the requisite goodies are pre-installed: Rails 2.1, Mongrel, PostgreSQL and MySQL, Subversion, Git, Capistrano, and a few others choice gems. You also get DTrace built into Ruby, if you’re keen on that sort of thing.
There’s also a sample Rails app in your home directory, and a pre-configured SMF file that serves as a handy introduction to the very handy Service Management Framework — the OpenSolaris system for managing daemons and other server processes.
Working with the OpenSolaris AMI team was a lot of fun, and in particular I’d like to give a thanks to Prashant who did most of the hard work getting everything set up.
Get your nerd on!
FOSCON III is upon us — tonight at 7:30 at Holocene. Prepare yourself for free pizza, lighting talks, and hob-knobbing with Ruby geeks from around the world.
Check out the Upcoming page for more information, including a map and how to hitch a ride from OSCON.
It’s that time of year again!
O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) is coming to Portland, and the Portland Ruby Group is putting on FOSCON, a free event where geeks of all stripes can meet, greet, and get their nerd on. The last two years were standing room only (don’t tell the fire marshal), so we’re movin’ on up to a larger venue!
If you’re coming to OSCON, register today for FOSCON III — it’s free!
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/216872
PS: If your business is interested in a little attention from an international crowd of alpha-geeks and decision makers, we’d love to talk with you about sponsorship for food, drinks, and other goodies.
Back in the days when I was a Java developer, there was a really hot meme called “dependency injection” (also known in some circles as “inversion of control”). The hype was oriented around the Spring framework, which promised to be the next hotness for developing web apps (amongst other things). It’s still around, and doing quite well, but I was seduced by Ruby on Rails before I could really sink my teeth into Spring.
Why am I rambling about this now? Last night when I was trying to fall asleep, Spring floated through my head and I wondered if there was a similar framework for Ruby. Lo and behold, it turns out Jamis Buck constructed a container back in the days before Rails became the web’s darling framework.
It’s called Copland, and this one example is enough to make me keep thinking about it …
