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Archive for the ‘Ruby on Rails’ Category

April 15th, 2010

Custom application and CMS integration

Posted by jeremy on April 15th, 2010

When we release a SaaS web application, such as IntuitionHQ, it’s inevitable that there will be two parts that make it up. The main part is the application itself. The second part is the marketing site that goes with it. The marketing site includes the content, and usually a way to sign up. It normally requires some integration with the application.

We choose Radiant for our CMS when working on internal projects. The reason we like it is for it’s simplicity and power. In this post I’ll go through the different ways we’ve experimented with to integrate our SaaS applications with Radiant based websites.

Tags: radiant, rails, ruby

Posted in: Ruby on Rails

2 Comments

October 29th, 2009

Hosting in the cloud

Posted by Nathan on October 29th, 2009

It’s been a busy time here at Boost, and we have just released our new web usability testing application IntuitionHQ. I’ll be writing a post about IntuitionHQ soon, but today I’d like to talk about hosting.

When we launched SonarHQ in April we decided to host on Slicehost. There were two main reasons we went with a virtualised hosting solution. The first was that we were not sure whether we would be scaling vertically (bigger, faster servers) or horizontally (splitting different functions onto different servers), and the second was the we wanted to be able to scale up and down in a fine-grained way.

Our initial approach with SonarHQ was to have 2 applications servers, 2 database servers and a utility server (for background tasks including mail). This approach gave us some redundancy and the ability to scale in either horizontally or vertically as needed. This has worked well, but we didn’t feel that the performance/price ratio is particularly good.

During our initial testing, we had IntuitionHQ setup at Slicehost in the same way. As we were preparing to launch, Engine Yard released Engine Yard Cloud. Built on top of the Amazon cloud infrastructure, Engine Yard Cloud provides a managed instance and configuration engine specifically optomised for hosting Ruby on Rails applications.

It was easy and painless to get IntuitionHQ up and running on Engine Yard Cloud – taking under an hour from start to finish. I don’t think it could have been any easier – everything just seems to work! We fired up a small instance and put through a quick series of load tests. It was evident even with casual clicking through the application that we were getting better response times. Working through the likely costs for hosting on Engine Yard Cloud, we found that we could use a 32bit, 5 ECU, 1.7GB RAM instance for around the same cost as our previous setup and get a useful boost in both performance and manageability.

One of the most significant benefits is the ability to scale vertically all the way to a 64bit, 20 ECU, 68GB RAM instance with a simple restart. Scaling horizontally is just as easy, and Engine Yard Cloud really takes the pain out of this.

Another important benefit has been the streamlining of our deployment processes. Engine Yard takes care of everything needed for automated deployments, and any custom deployment tasks are easily handled with Chef recipes. Deploying multiple application instances is easy and works seamlessly, with Engine Yard implementing a proxying system with failover across all instances without the need for a separate proxy instance (and single point of failure) – a significant cost saving. Running a seperate instance (or set of instances) for the databases is as easy as ticking a checkbox.

The image used for the instance is kept up to date with the latest security and reliability patches and is used each time our application is deployed. This gives you a semi-managed hosting system without any of the associated costs.

The margin over standard Amazon EC2 is reasonably high for the small instances but reduces to a 10% premium on the biggest instances. This is very reasonable and for us makes a great deal of sense.

The one thing that would make this much more affordable is the ability to use Amazon reserved instances. These give you a discounted hourly rate for the instance once a one off payment is made. If you know what you need and can commit to a year, this can effectively half the hosting costs.

We launched IntuitionHQ a week ago and have been extremely happy with the performance and utility of Engine Yard Cloud. We are looking forward to growing IntuitionHQ and are confident that Engine Yard Cloud can grow with us.

Tags: Deployment, Development, Hosting, rails, ruby

Posted in: Ruby on Rails

No Comments

September 11th, 2009

Squirrel and the custom nut matcher

Posted by jeremy on September 11th, 2009

I recently found squirrel, and I wanted to use it for a project we’re working on to simplify some complex finder statements. Squirrel allows turning something like this:

Task.find(:all,
  :conditions =&gt; [
    'active = ? and (updated_at &gt; cache_version or cache_version IS NULL)', true
  ]
)

into:

Task.find(:all) do
  active == true
  any do
    updated_at &gt; cache_version
    cache_version.nil?
  end
end

The problem is testing

Then I ran into a serious problem – how to test this piece of code using rspec? Here was my first attempt: more »

Tags: rails, rspec, ruby, tdd

Posted in: Development, Ruby on Rails

2 Comments

August 20th, 2009

Choosing which database indexes to add

Posted by jeremy on August 20th, 2009

When writing a Rails application, how do you decide on the best indexes to add to your database? It might seem obvious, especially if you work on a project from scratch. The problem is a little harder when you come to optimize an existing codebase.

New Relic

Recently I’ve been using two methods to work out where to put indexes. Firstly I’d strongly recommend using New Relic RPM in development mode. When running your application you can visit /newrelic to get all kinds of useful information. Here you can see the most recent rails calls:

Tags: mysql, rails

Posted in: Development, Ruby on Rails

2 Comments

July 24th, 2009

DigitalNZ client library for ruby

Posted by jeremy on July 24th, 2009

We’ve just released a new client library for accessing the digitalnz.org’s search API. This library uses nokogiri for speedily parsing the XML, making it faster than an existing dnz client library using JSON parsing.

Installation

sudo gem install dnz-client

Or for the bleeding edge (if there is one):

sudo gem install boost-dnz-client

You’ll need to have an API key from digitalnz.org
more »

Tags: ruby

Posted in: Ruby on Rails

2 Comments

June 22nd, 2009

Writing tests/specs for existing code

Posted by jeremy on June 22nd, 2009

On several occasions we’ve looked at Rails projects with no tests, or very low test coverage. Trying to write tests when you didn’t write the original methods is difficult. Here are some tips that we’ve found useful.

Use your favourite framework.

If there is a large body of existing tests using a particular framework, write your new tests in that framework. If there are few or no tests then strip out anything already there and replace it with your preferred framework. At Boost we’ve decided to use RSpec for all our projects. Your objective here is to write tests, not to learn a new way of writing tests. more »

Tags: rspec, ruby, tdd, testing

Posted in: Ruby on Rails

No Comments

April 29th, 2009

Extracting Active Directory SIDs with Ruby

Posted by jeremy on April 29th, 2009

Getting user and group information from Active Directory via LDAP is nearly easy, but I came across one hurdle. If you retrieve a user, you might get something like this:

{
  :smaccountname =&gt; ['jeremy'],
  :dn =&gt; ‘["CN=Jeremy Wells,CN=Users,DC=domain,DC=boost,DC=co,DC=nz"],
  :primarygroupid =&gt; ['1114'],
  :objectsid =&gt; ["010500000000000525000000\210B ?\23302r\255ոT040000"]
}

If you then wanted to get the users primary group, you’d need to search using that primary group id. But you’d find there is no corresponding id on the group object, which looks as thus:

{
  :samaccountname=&gt;["Students"],
  :dn=&gt;["CN=Students,OU=Groups,DC=domain,DC=boost,DC=co,DC=nz"],
  :objectsid=&gt;["010500000000000525000000\210B ?\23302r\255ոZ040000"],
  :name=&gt;["Students"]
}

But notice the binary field :objectsid. This is the binary form of the string you may see sometimes when using AD, called SID, and it looks something like “S-1-5-21-123-456-789″. In order to find the users group you would take the :primarygroupid and the users :objectsid to generate the groups SID.

Tags: active directory, ruby, windows

Posted in: Ruby on Rails

No Comments

March 20th, 2009

JRuby presentation for WellRailed

Posted by jeremy on March 20th, 2009

On the 25th of February ’09 I did a brief JRuby presentation on JRuby and how we’re using it at Boost. We’re really excited about some of the capabilities of JRuby.

We’re running a client deployment on Tomcat fronted by IIS, and it was really easy to get everything set up. We wanted to try another deployment on Glassfishv3 with no webserver in front. Unfortunately (and glassfishv3 is still in development) there were two barriers that prevented us doing so more »

Tags:

Posted in: Development, Ruby on Rails

No Comments

Boost Blog

Archive for the ‘Ruby on Rails’ Category

Custom application and CMS integration

Hosting in the cloud

Squirrel and the custom nut matcher

The problem is testing

Choosing which database indexes to add

New Relic

DigitalNZ client library for ruby

Installation

Writing tests/specs for existing code

Use your favourite framework.

Extracting Active Directory SIDs with Ruby

JRuby presentation for WellRailed

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