“Anyone working with distributed programming in Ruby will want this book.”

The only downside they saw in the book, was that they wanted it to be longer! I have to save something for the 2nd edition, don’t I?

If you haven’t purchased yours yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s on sale at Amazon.com right now.

If you have reviewed the book, or know of a review of the book, please pass it along.

It was an absolutely amazing experience and I can’t thank everyone involved with the project enough for all of their help, guidance, and having to put up with me over the past year.

I would go into detail about all the people I wish to thank, but I did that already in the book, and let’s be honest, you’re going to buy it and read it anyway, so I don’t want to ruin the surprise.

I’m sure you’ve already purchased your copy, but if you haven’t might I recommend you pop over to Amazon right now and pick yourself up a copy. They’re selling pretty well and you don’t want to miss out, do you? I didn’t think so.

If you are someone with a popular blog and you would like to do a review of the book, please drop me a line and I’ll see what we can do about hooking you up with a copy. Please understand, though, the publishers aren’t going to send out copies to everyone who requests them, so there will be a bit of vetting going on.

Also, if you have already purchased the book if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review of it on Amazon, that would be much appreciated. It doesn’t matter where you bought the book, if you could leave a review there, it will really make a difference. Thanks.

Buy “Distributed Programming with Ruby” Today!

Unfortunately, the “Rough Cuts” book on O’Reilly’s Safari site hasn’t been updated in nearly 3 months! I’m not sure why. I keep asking my editor to update it, but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m sure it will soon, especially since the first draft of the entire manuscript will be done in just a few weeks!

UPDATE: Today they updated the “Rough Cuts” with nearly the latest revisions. It’s still missing the chapters on Delayed Job and BackgrounDRb, but it’s closer than it was yesterday.

Anyway, as a public service announcement to you, the readers, I thought I would the table of contents as it stands right now, so you have a better idea of what the book is going to be about. So here it goes:

What do you think? Does it look good? Is this something you’d buy? Let me know. This is your chance to have an influence on a book. If you think something is missing or should be laid out differently, please let me know, it might just make it into the final product.

Ok, enough delaying here, let me get back to writing so I can finish up the Delayed Job chapter.

As you can see it has evolved quite a bit from what was posted on Rough Cuts just about a month ago. Chances are that it will probably change again, and as it does, I’ll try and keep you all posted. There is talk of adding a large chapter at the end that takes a handful of the technologies I discuss in the book and use them to build a “real world” example application, like a Twitter clone, or something like that. If anyone has any good ideas on what they would like to see for this example, please them my way, I’d love to hear them.

If there are no sections listed below a particular chapter that means that I have either not written it yet, or I’m still too early in that chapter’s development to have properly assigned it actual sections.

The first draft of the book is slated for the end of July. So there is still a lot of work to be done, but it’s still rather exciting. Well, it’s exciting for me at least. Talk to you all soon.

While I don’t want to give too much away about the contents, everybody loves a good surprise, let me say that part one of the book will be the most comprehensive guide to DRb and Rinda that you’ll find anywhere. Including the source code!!

I’m working hard on part two of the book which focuses on third party tools, frameworks, and libraries. It’s quite a fun part of the book to write as there are a great deal of choices out there, including my own Distribunaut. (PS. I released a new version of it on GitHub a week or so ago.) Writing about different libraries is quite fun as I get to really delve into the source code and see the good and bad ways people like to write code. Plus some of the libraries have really great features, or really turn things on their head.

When the book is available as a “Rough Cut”, I’ll certainly keep you all informed. In the mean time keep watching this space and have a great weekend!

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.

http://www.rubyconf.org/talks/15

Building multiple applications that all need to share data and other information between can be a daunting and challenging task. Mark will help to demystify the use of Ruby systems such as Rinda and DRb and show you how they can be used to link applications together. Through the development of the Mack framework and its use in building Helium.com, Mark will share the highlights and the pitfalls of distributed application development.

Make sure and sign up for the conference today, as attendance is limited to only 500.

Back on March 26th Mack 0.4.0 was released. This release brought the first of three large distributed features, Distributed Routes. With 0.7.0 Mack fully realizes it’s goal of making it easy to write fully distributed web applications. There is a very nice wiki page, on our new wiki, that shows in detail how to use the new distributed features. That page can found here. Also, don’t forget to watch the screencast of the new distributed features that can be found here.

Distributed Objects

Distributed objects allow you to easily distribute access to your library and model code amongst any of your other Mack applications. Allowing this access is as simple as requiring the mack-distributed gem, adding a few lines to your configuration, and starting the mack_ring_server binary. ‘Client’ applications just need to require the mack-distributed gem.

Distributed Views/Layouts

With distributed views and layouts you can now share the look and feel from one application with all of your applications. Configuration and use is just as easy using distributed objects.

Form and HTML Helpers

People have been requesting more HTML and form helper methods, and we’re more than happy to comply. There are whole bunch of these new methods now to help you more easily build your applications. The generators have been updated to use these new methods, to make your job even easier. There is also now support for doing Date/Time drop downs, similar to Rails and Merb.

‘Tell’ Messaging

Rails folks know ‘tell’ messaging as ‘flash’ messaging and Merb folks know it as ‘message’ messaging. We went with ‘tell’. Tell messages are cleared after any non-redirect request. They’re a great way to send a simple message down to the client.

New Wiki

With this release there is also a new wiki at, http://www.mackwiki.com. This new wiki, incidentally built using Mack 0.7.0, will house all the tutorials and how-to’s for Mack. There are a few entries from the old wiki that still need to brought over during the next day or two.

Changelog:

• [#114] Javascript link_helper
• [#112] Error generating mack application
• [#109] DataMapper 0.9.4
• [#103] Log colors for the console are now configurable per log level.
• [#102] New association method in data_factory
• [#101] Update to file upload testing (build_file -> file_for_upload, and multipart support in put)
• [#100] Inline routing parameters are being mutated
• [#99] Upgraded to facets 2.4.3
• [#98] Fixed mack-facets not being loaded before app_config files.
• [#97] Fixed sessions only working with ‘local_memory’ mode
• [#96] Distributed Views module now uses file cache
• [#92] Removed deprecated app_config.orm code.
• [#91] Fixed Mack blowing up if there is no config/initializers/gems.rb file.
• [#90] Added deprecation system.
• [#89] rake gems:* will now only display warning if any gem required is not installed (and not break)
• [#88] Implemented pending SQLite3 tests in mack-activerecord
• [#87] Refactored out common ORM code from mack-active_record and mack-data_mapper into mack-orm
• [#86] stylesheet link helper
• [#85] Refactored out Mack::ViewHelpers::HtmlHelpers into Mack::ViewHelpers::HtmlHelpers, Mack::ViewHelpers::FormHelpers and Mack::ViewHelpers::linkHelpers
• [#84] Added Mack::Distributed.lookup(url) to retrieve specific distributed services.
• [#83] Added mail_to HTML helper.
• [#82] Added ACL support to mack-distributed
• [#81] Fixed sessions working with redirects in testing
• [#80] Distributed objects present both the DRb::DRbObject inspect and the original object’s inspect when asked.
• [#79] Renamed app_config.mack.use_distributed_routes to app_config.mack.share_routes
• [#76] Move mack_ring_server to mack-distributed
• [#75] Left over mack-distributed rake tasks
• [#74] Added optional feature to disable initialization logging.
• [#73] Tests no longer use the functional/unit directories
• [#69] Added ViewHelperGenerator and ControllerHelperGenerator
• [#68] Transactional support in mack-AR
• [#67] Added test:setup tasks for active_record and data_mapper
• [#62] Removed const redefined warnings if mack-l10n is used along with mack-activerecord
• [#39] HAML 2.0.2 support
• [#28] Refactored out encryption into the mack-encryption gem.
• [#25] Added ControllerGenerator
• [#19] Added HTML form helpers
• [#15] File upload testing support (ability to do multipart form post in testing)
• [#11] Distributed Layout/Views
• [#10] Added distributed objects to mack-distributed.
• [#8] Move distributed code from mack-core to mack-more
• [#5] Added tell messaging
• gem: genosaurus 1.2.2
• gem: haml 2.0.2
• gem: addressable 1.0.4
• gem: facets 2.4.3
• gem: data_mapper 0.9.4

There’s still some work to go on this, like the ability to pass in command line args to the task to build the full migration for you, but it’s a start! It’s now pretty easy to get your app going.

Also in this release is a rewrite of the distributed routing functionality. It’s now been rewritten to use Rinda. This is going to be the standard for all the distributed functionality that will be coming Mack over the next couple of months. As more functionality lke this is developed, the more it will be wrapped in nice, easy to use APIs.

There’s also been some tidying up here in there in the code tree. For example, new applications don’t get generated with a boot.rb file. Looking at it, there’s really no need for it, since everything is done with Rake tasks.

Overall, I’m very happy with the release, and I feel that this release definitely makes Mack a VERY useable framework because of the migration support. Enjoy!

Changelog:

• Removed boot.rb file. It was unnecessary.
• When a new Mack application is generated the Rakefile that gets generated is stamped with the Mack gem version used to create it. This ties the project to that gem. This can, of course, be upgraded as new Mack gems come out, but it’s a good way of tying your app to a specific revision of Mack.
• Added support for migrations for both ActiveRecord and DataMapper. DataMapper migration support requires DataMapper 0.3.0 gem. Please keep in mind, though, that DataMapper 0.3.0 has a serious bug in it, which may prevent you from using it. Please see http://www.mackframework.com/2008/04/09/horrible-bug-in-datamapper-030/ for more information.
• Rewrote distributed routing support to use Rinda inside of plain old DRb. This makes for an almost zero configuration usage.
• Added: mack_ring_server binary to start a Rinda ring server for use with distributed routing.
• Sqlite3 is now the default database for Mack applications configured with ORM support.
• Added a test helper method, rake_task, to aid in the testing of Rake tasks.
• Added: rake generate:migration name=<migration_name>
• Added: rake db:migrate
• Added: rake db:abort_if_pending_migrations
• Added: rake db:rollback
• Added: rake db:version
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:start
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:stop
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:restart
• Added: rake mack:ring_server:services:list
• gem: application_configuration 1.2.2
• gem: daemons 1.0.10