Introduction

I have been using NetBeans 6.1 IDE for some time forcing myself to use JRuby because of the issues that NetBeans has with Ruby. I must say my experience thus far has been superior to any NetBeans release to date. That being said I am planning on using this post to list potential to make the core NetBeans 6.X/7.X the best release for Ruby on Rails developers.

Enhancement Requests

I want to preface this section of the post with the fact that I feel NetBeans is a wonderful IDE and has many features that many Java developers benefit from. That being said this is by no means discrediting any of the wonderful advancements they have brought to the Rails IDE arena.

Permissions

Using NetBeans 6.1 without JRuby is just a hassle. The implementation either needs to be dropped or made more seamless.

Gem Management

There needs to be a better quicker way to manage gems. Currently it is a long painful process which is different from what Rails developers are used to. I am a die-hard Mac OS X Rails developer and I am used to opening up the terminal and managing my gems there. I thing the best solution for this is to have a jruby/gem console that opens the terminal with the correct PATH specified and all the gem management can be done right there.

Rake Tasks

Rails developers prefer using their keyboards with shortcuts. We are used to quick editors that have great keyboard support. The editor that comes to mind is TextMate. That being said I feel there must be a better way to run rake tasks and other commands that are run frequently through the command line.

Source Code Management

GIT is the new hotness in the rails world and there needs to be solid support for git in NetBeans. There is not much of a message here except for that git support is a must.

Capistrano Integration

This would make NetBeans a HUGE success. Integration with Capistrano for developers to deploy their application. There could be some sort of collaboration on deployment where you can test each app that is marked for deployment on a local glassfish server and then one of the choices get deployed out to production.

Conclusion

Any of the above enhancement requests are welcome to collaboration and improvement via commands or email. I look forward to your comments.

Introduction

Git has become quite the popular version control system in the rails community. That being said I am announcing that I will stop using ports for my tutorials and install everything from source. There are advantages and disadvantages to this and the main reason is that I am sick of waiting for ports that are outdated.

Requirements

This install is quite easy. All the dependencies required ship with Mac OS X Leopard. That being said lets get started. For this to install successfully you must have the following installed on your computer:

• Apple Developer Tools

Installation

Download the latest package from Git At the time of writing this tutorial the current version is Git 1.5.5.

Below are the directions to completely install the Git version control system.

cd /usr/local/src
curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.5.tar.bz2
tar -xjf git-1.5.5.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Introduction

Lately I have been working hard testing many deployment options for rails applications. The results are quite interesting. I will be going into detail analysis of each setup that we testing including hardware I used, how I setup each test, the benchmarks (obviously) and lastly the winners for each category. As we know DHH doesnt recommend Rails apps to be hosted on shared hosting solutions. That being said Slicehost has done wonderfully and we recommend them highly.

Our Situation

We have been looking for a way to optimize our rails app hosting solution. Currently we use Litespeed 3.3.9 and the Ruby LSAPI. This decreases the memory requirements immensely compared to other solutions like thin.

Testing

Ruby Interpreter Tests

• Ruby18/JRuby - Performance & Memory Requirements

WebServer Tests

• Nginx with Mongrel
• Nginx with Thin
• Litespeed
• Apache with Passenger
• Glassfish/JRuby

More on all of this in my upcoming post. Any comments are requests for benchmarks are welcome and encouraged!

Regards, Ron

Most of the performance benefit in FreeBSD is gained by switching from the default 4BSD scheduler to the ULE scheduler. This scheduler was introduced to FreeBSD in version 5. Since its induction to FreeBSD it has seen many improvements. By the end of this guide you will be booted into FreeBSD 7 and using the ULE scheduler.

cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf
cp GENERIC CUSTOM
ee CUSTOM

There are two things to change in this file then we can move to compiling and installing the new and improved kernel.

ident        CUSTOM
options       SCHED_ULE

Thats it! once that is done running the following commands and reboot.

cd /usr/src
make kernel KERNCONF=CUSTOM

This is a surprisingly simple process. I just upgraded my development system and it took me about 10 minutes to be completely back up and running. As of FreeBSD 6.3 the freebsd-update utility supports upgrading to new binary releases. All of this can be done in one simple step.

freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.0-RELEASE

Enjoy!