These are all very good applications and have served myself and my clients well, but they’ve suffered from several very big flaws. The first big flaw was the cost. You can easily drop $100 or more a month across these different services. But that wasn’t the biggest flaw or problem I’ve had with these services. The biggest problem was lack of integration.

So what do I mean by lack of integration? Well, when an error comes in I want to easily be able to create a new issue from it. When the issue gets resolved, so should the error. If the error reoccurs it should re-open automatically, and so should the issue. I want to be able to create an issue right from a document or be able to attach issues to a document. I should be able to follow the flow from document to issue to error and back again very easily. Unfortunately, these applications don’t give you that level of integration. They offer some level, but just not enough.

Well, my friends, welcome to the future. Welcome to FluxTracker.com. FluxTracker combines a great issue tracker, a project management system, and an error tracker all in one application. Now you can full integration without any configuration, oh, and you can do it at a fraction of the cost!

We know it isn’t easy to switch to a different application, that’s why we’ve made it easy for you. You can easily import your Lighthouse account. FluxTracker also allows you to easily use the Hoptoad Notifier plugin for your project by just setting a few configuration parameters.

So know you know, you’re life can be easier. And you now know how easy it is to get started! So what are you waiting for? Go and sign up for our Free plan and start living the dream.

The response to CoverMe has been great and through feedback from the community I’ve made a lot of improvements and fixed a lot of issues.

While quite a few things have changed under the hood, not much has changed in how you use CoverMe.

Installation

The following are instructions for how you would configure CoverMe for a Rails 3 project, adjust to your local environment accordingly.

In  your Gemfile add the following:

gem 'cover_me', '>= 1.0.0.rc1', :group => :test

Then run:

$ bundle install

After CoverMe is installed place the following line at the VERY TOP of your ‘test_helper.rb’ or ‘spec_helper.rb’ file (for Cucumber put it at the top of the ‘env.rb’ file):

require 'cover_me'

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is that the require statement is at the VERY top of that file!

Finally (and optionally) run:

$ rails g cover_me:install

This will simply install a Rake task that will wrap both Test::Unit and RSpec tasks with CoverMe and will launch the results at the end of the test suites. I would recommend it. It’s kinda the whole point.

That’s it!

Enjoy the release candidate, and of course, please let me know if you find any issues with it. Issues can be reported on here.

Enter CoverMe.

History

While working on a Ruby 1.9/Rails 3 project, and loving everything about it (except for the lack of RCov), I came across a post by Aaron Patterson (of Nokogiri fame). In this post he quickly outlined a very basic coverage tool using the new built-in Coverage module in Ruby 1.9.

After spending a morning playing with it, I was quickly able to grow the idea into something useful for the project. Later that day the company I was consulting for (BiddingForGood.com), and in particular their chief architect, Stuart Garner, told me to take a day or two and clean it up and release it for the world to use, and so here it is.

Features

Here is a brief overview of the features of CoverMe:

Index Page

• Sortable column headers (File, Lines, Lines of Code, Tested %).
• Searching/filtering by file name.
• Filtering by coverage percent.
• Color coded list of files to quickly see which ones are 100% covered, > 90% covered, or less than 90% covered.
• Large color coded average coverage percent, for quick reference.

Detail Page

• Line by line coverage report
• Color coded lines to quickly see which lines where executed and which ones were not.
• Side by side viewing with the corresponding test/spec file (if one exists).

See the README file for more information on installation and usage.

Thanks

I would just quickly like to give another quick thanks to Aaron Patterson for pointing out the Coverage module in Ruby 1.9 and inspiring this, hopefully, helpful little gem. Also another big thanks to Stuart Garner for pushing me to package this up and release it to the world.

Screenshots

I’ve decided to just include my README file below to explain what it is, since it’s a bit lengthy, and I don’t feel like retyping.

This is still in it’s early stages, so use with care, but it does seem to be working for us on a daily basis. Let me know what you think!

What is Warp Drive?

Warp Drive is what Rails Engines wish they could be, and more! They kick Rails templates in the ass, and they beat keeping an ever evolving base Rails app up to date.

What are Rails Engines?

Rails Engines allow you to package up some of a Rails app (controllers, models, views, routes, libs) and put them in a plugin that can be included into a new Rails app, thereby giving it the functionality you had in the engine. That sounds good, but what about the downsides of using an engine? Well, you can’t override or extend any of the functionality from the engine in your main application. You can hack at the plugin, but now you’ve made it difficult to update. So what do you do if you want to add or alter a method to a controller or model? What do you do if you want to change the look and feel of a view? You have to copy everything into your main application. Boo!

Rails Engines also don’t allow you to package up migrations, assets, plugins, initializers, etc… All the fun stuff that you’ve come to know and love about a Rails application.

Enter the Warp Drive!

So what is a Warp Drive? Great question. To put it simply a Warp Drive is a standard, full featured, Rails application that you can easily bundle up into a Ruby Gem, and include into another Rails app. That second Rails app now has all the power of the first Rails. That is all there is to it.

Creating a Warp Drive.

Let’s assume we have an application that implements AuthLogic for handling user registration/authentication. We have controllers, views, models, plugins, initializers, configurations, migrations, tasks, etc… it’s a full featured fully functional Rails application, we call it authenticator.

We want to turn our authenticator application into a Warp Drive. We can do it in three simple steps, the first two steps you only need to do the first time, to set everything up.

1. $ gem install warp_drive
2. $ warpify
   That will add a little bit of code to your Rakefile. That code simply requires the Warp Drive gem, and gives you hooks to configure the gem of your Warp Drive application.
3. $ rake warp_drive:compile (rake warp_drive:install)This will either compile your gem for your (warp_drive:compile) or compile and install your gem (warp_drive:install)

That’s it! You should now have your Rails application bundled up and/or installed as a RubyGem!

Using a Warp Drive.

With your fancy new Warp Drive, authenticator, built and installed how do you use it in that new application your building? Again, it’s stupid easy, and it only takes one step, that only needs to be run once:

$ install_warp_drive authenticator

That will put a few lines of code in your Rakefile, so you have access to all the Rakefile tasks in your Warp Drive, and a line in your config/environment.rb so that it will load your Warp Drive when you launch your application.

That’s it! You’re done. Now you can run rake db:migrate to run the migrations from both your Warp Drive and your new application. Enjoy!

Overriding, Extending, and Other Such Fun Things

Overriding and Extending

You’ve been enjoying your new Warp Drive back application for a little while now, but you decide you really need to change an action in your controller, how do you go about that? Simple, just like you would any normal alteration to a Ruby class.

Example:
Here is what the action looks like in our Warp Drive UsersController:

  def new
    @user = User.new
  end

In our new application we can just open up the UsersController like this:

  class UsersController < ApplicationController

    def new_with_default_name
      new_without_default_name
      @user.login = 'default_name'
    end

    alias_method_chain :new, :default_name

  end

Viola! The same works for any thing else in the system, models, libs, etc… In our example we used alias_method_chain to retain the original method, but we could have completely rewritten the method as well.

You can also plop in a new view and it will override the view that was in your Warp Drive. The sky is really the limit.

Assets

You can easily bundle assets from your public directory in your Warp Drive. Just make sure they are in folders called warp_drive. Those folders will then be symlinked to your new project’s public directory when the application starts up.

Keep Those Rake Tasks Private!

We all them, Rake tasks we have created to help us do all sorts of things, and we usually don’t want them to ship. Well, Warp Drive has you covered there. Just place your tasks in folders called private and Bob’s your uncle they won’t be available in the compiled gem.

  lib/
    tasks/
      foo.rake
      private/
        bar.rake

In this example foo.rake will be available to clients of your Warp Drive, but bar.rake will not be.

Copyright (c) 2009 Mark Bates

Installing/upgrading is easy:

$ sudo gem install apn_on_rails
$ ruby script/generate apn_migrations
$ rake db:migrate


It’s important to always run the migrations generator after each update to get the latest database schema needed for the the gem.

To use the new Feedback integration you have to first make sure that you update the new last_registered_at column when your iPhone application calls home. This column is checked against the timestamp Apple returns with the device token. If the last_registered_at is older than Apple’s date then the device is deleted, otherwise the Feedback is ignored.

To get and process the list of devices from Apple’s Feedback service just run the following Rake task:

$ rake apn:feedback:process

Enjoy!

Enter the APN on Rails gem. While searching I found one plugin for Rails that mostly worked for me, Sam Soffes’ apple_push_notification plugin. It was a great place to start, but I found that there were things that didn’t suite me. For starters, not having any tests is always a big turn off for me when it comes to any code. I also didn’t like that you didn’t need to save a notification in order to send it. That means you don’t have a record of what was sent and when. I also wanted to have devices stored separately from the notification. Finally, I wanted to be able to easily configure the plugin. Sam’s was using constants that would need to be changed when it hit production.

So, with all that said and done I took Sam’s great work, ripped it apart, and put it back together again, this time in gem form instead of a plugin, and here it is.

There are a few migrations, a few models, and a few Rake tasks, but here is the basic idea of how it works:

To get a better understanding of exactly how it works, and what it does, I highly recommend reading the RDOC.

There are a few things I still would like to add, for example, a controller to do CRUD for devices so iPhones can register with the Rails app. I’d also like to add a task that talks to Apple and finds out which devices are no longer accepting messages so they can be removed.

If you’d like to contribute, please feel free and for the project on GitHub:
http://github.com/markbates/apn_on_rails/tree

Again, a special thanks to Fabien Penso and Sam Soffes for their initial work on this project.

So what was I unhappy about?

Configuration:

I was pretty unhappy with the way configuration was being done. I liked using Configatron to power the configuration, but I didn’t like the way I implemented the way I was using Configatron. For example, to set up one of the default settings, like the expiry time, you would configure it like such:

configatron.cachetastic_default_options.expiry_time = 30.minutes

Now you would configure that same option like this:

configatron.cachetastic.defaults.expiry_time = 30.minutes

That’s a little savings, but it really hits when you want to configure a particular cache. Let’s say we a cache called My::Super::AwesomeCache, to configure it in past versions of Cachetastic we would do this:

configatron.my_super_awesome_cache_options.expiry_time = 15.minutes

Now in Cachetastic 3.0.0 we configure like this:

configatron.cachetastic.my.super.awesome_cache.expire_time = 15.minutes.

As you can see all configuration now happens under the cachetastic namespace in Configatron. Then it’s a matter of using a Configatron namespace for each of your modules. I find it a lot easier to manage.

Another change in configuration is that in previous versions if you wanted to override one default configuration value for a particular cache,  you had to override them all. Now, you can just override the one value  you want, and the rest will be nicely inherited from the defaults.

Speed

Cachetastic has always been a very fast library, but I knew that more could be squeezed from that stone. With Cachetastic 3.0.0 you now get a hefty 25% improvement in the Memcached adapter and a whopping 99% in the LocalMemory adapter! Those are pretty awesome numbers. These numbers were easy to achieve when I stepped back and examined what it was I really wanted to do, and picked the most straightforward path to that goal.

Bloat

After more than two years Cachetastic was starting to suffer from a severe case of bloat. For example, I’ve never used the DRb adapter, have you? So why is it there? The same goes for the HtmlFile adapter. I wrote that because at my last job the operations team weren’t savvy  enough to be able to get Apache to talk to Memcached, so they wanted to serve HTML files, hence the rather awful adapter. Both of those adapters are now history.

There also used to be support for Rails Session Caching. Considering that most people are now using the Cookie store for sessions, there really is no need for this cache. It could also be argued that it should not have been bundled with Cachetastic at all. I would agree with those arguments. Cachetastic is, and should always be, a standalone caching framework, that can be plugged into Rails or any plain old Ruby project that needs caching support.

Also purged is automatic support for mixing in the Cachetastic::Cacheable module into ActiveRecord. If you want this functionality, it is very easy to include in your application. I don’t want to force it on anyone, so that is gone now.

Finally there are a handful of smaller features that I’m sure no one will miss that I’ve yanked out in the name of performance, reliability, and ease of maintenance.

Nice and Clean

When I realized what I really wanted, and what I didn’t want, it became clear that what was needed was a fresh code base. With that said, I hit delete (well, not really) and started over again. The code is now smooth, so much easier to read, and fast. In previous versions even my eyes went a bit crossed when I tried to figure out exactly what was going on. There where quite a few levels of indirection, and things just weren’t place where they probably should’ve been. That has all been fixed.

With a nice, clean code base comes a brand new set of tests. The tests are now extremely comprehensive, and while 2.x was very well tested, I know that 3.0.0, is tested to the hilt.

Because 3.0.0 is a brand new code base, I should probably stress the fact that is NOT backward compatible. So please be advised.

Installation:

$ sudo gem install cachetastic

Conclusion

I really hope everyone likes this brand new version of Cachetastic. I’m very happy with it, and I think if you give it a chance, you will be too.

If you’d like to have a peek at the RDoc, it can be found at:
http://cachetastic-api.mackframework.com/

I’ve started working on porting the mack-distributed package to the non-Mack world. This new project, and I use the term new loosely for the time being, is tentatively called Distribunaut. The project on GitHub can be found here: http://github.com/markbates/distribunaut/tree/master. It’s pretty rough right now. I’ve ported over the distributed objects section of mack-distributed, but not the views and routes.

You can install the gem like such:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ sudo gem install markbates-distribunaut

To use Distribunaut we first need to start a Rinda::RingServer. Distribunaut comes with a binary to help make this easier:

$ distribunaut_ring_server start

Once we’ve done that we can create an object we would like to share:

When we run that we can access it like such:

That would result in the following being printed out by our ‘client’ code:

On our ‘server’ side we would see something like this:

This is, clearly, a very simple example, but it shows you how easy it is to use Distribunaut. We haven’t done any real configuration, and things just magically work!

Over the next couple of months I’ll be extending and rebuilding this library to make it even more powerful and easy to use. I’m going to add fault tolerance, selection algorithms, and whole lot more. The API you see in these examples will most likely remain unchanged, but I’m planning on pretty big under the cover changes.There will be a very in-depth look into all of this in the book, obviously. (Shameless plug, I know.)

If anybody out there wants to contribute to this project, I’d love the help. Any sort of feedback is welcome.

Ruby 1.9

The big one. Mack runs very well on Ruby 1.9, unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about some other frameworks. I’ve had some run ins with DataMapper on 1.9, but I’m sure those will be ironed out shortly.

A few weeks ago I announced I was working on getting Ruby 1.9 support for all my gems and libraries. I started out with Configatron, then upgraded Cachetastic and Genosaurus. Now Mack is 1.9 compatible. When I made the announcement the guys at RailsEnvy picked up on it and said that I made a call to arms to the community to pick up 1.9 support. Now granted, I didn’t actually say those words, but I think the intent was there, so I’m going to now officially say those words. This is a ‘call to arms’ to the Ruby community to upgrade their gems, plugins, libraries, frameworks, etc… to work on Ruby 1.9. I’ve done it, and I can tell you, it’s not that tough. Just use multiruby, and you’re off and running.

ActiveSupport In, Facets Out

What with the world getting smaller these days, well, at least the world of Ruby web frameworks. A lot of great work is going into refactoring ActiveSupport and making it faster, better, and smaller. Because of that and the fact that every time a new release of Facets comes out it breaks a whole lot of stuff, I’ve decided to use ActiveSupport as the basis of the mack-facets gem. So basically mack-facets is just ActiveSupport with a few more enhancements.

JavaScript Effects

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Gerardo Pis-Lopez, mack-javascript, has been upgraded to add helpers methods for effects for both Prototype/Scriptaculous and jQuery. Thank you to Gerardo for the much needed upgraded to mack-javascript.

Upgrades

Mack has been upgraded to use Rack 0.9.1, DataMapper 0.9.9, and a few other smaller gems.

Changelog:

• [#243] Upgraded to Rack 0.9.1
• [#242] Upgraded to DataMapper 0.9.9
• [#241] Removed dependency on Facets
• [#239] Add do_sqlite3 to gems.rb
• [#166] Effects for mack-javascript
• [#133] Added Form Builders
• [#22] Ruby 1.9 Support
• gem: rack 0.9.1
• gem: rspec 1.1.12
• gem: configatron 2.2.2
• gem: cachetastic 2.1.2
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.9
• gem: addressable 2.0.1
• gem: extlib 0.9.9

So with that said, what’s in 0.8.2? Honestly, not a whole lot. There are a couple of bug fixes, a button_to_remote (think submit_to_remote in Rails) helper, and deferred routes. More on deferred routes in a moment, as it’s actually a pretty cool feature that only Mack and Merb share. And finally there is bundled gems.

Bundled Gems

What do I mean I say ‘bundled gems’? Well, because of the rather large number of gems that get installed with Mack, and because of some gem version dependency issues, Mack is now bundling it’s third party dependency gems inside itself. For example, mack-facets used to rely on the gems ‘facets’ and ‘english’. Those gems are now bundled inside the mack-facets gem and now longer need to be downloaded and installed by end users. This should make installing Mack super easy. It should also make dealing with having multiple versions of Mack installed on your system easier to deal with and maintain.

Deferred? Routes

So what are deferred routes? Ezra wrote a really great write up back in April. The idea is simple, with newer web servers such as Thin and Ebb, you can tell them to spawn a new thread to handle particular requests, such as long running processes like file uploads. This can really help speed things up as server can process regular requests using an event machine model, which is very fast, but can be really slow and block the server for longer processes. Now those processes can spawn into their own threads and not block the server.

In Mack 0.8.2 you can mark your routes with a deferred? => true option which will trigger this behavior. It’s much more advanced than the similar feature that can be found in Merb, which requires a separate configuration for your deferred actions, and the urls have to be ‘hard coded’. Mack let’s you use all the dynamic power of your routes, like you would want to. It’s just another option on the route itself. For a great tutorial on using deferred routes, check out the following page on www.mackery.com:

http://www.mackery.com/routing/deferred_routes

Upgraded Dependencies

A few gems have been upgraded as part of this release, the big ones include DataMapper to 0.9.7, ActiveRecord to 2.2.2, and Haml to 2.0.4.

Changelog:

• [#237] Fixed render :rjs throws errors
• [#236] Upgraded to ActiveRecord 2.2.2
• [#235] Upgraded to DataMapper 0.9.7
• [#230] Upgraded to facets 2.4.5
• [#229] Upgraded to english 0.3.1
• [#227] Removed WEBrick logging
• [#226] Bundled gems.
• [#225] Removed dependency on Thin
• [#223] Fixed mackery console fails
• [#148] Added button_to_remote helper method.
• [#16] Added deferred? routes.
• gem: active_record 2.2.2
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.7
• gem: addressable 2.0.0
• gem: facets 2.4.5
• gem: english 0.3.1
• gem: rspec 1.1.11
• gem: haml 2.0.4