Vegas, Here We Come!

The State of XML Parsing in Ruby (Circa 2009)
It’s almost the end of 2009, and I have to ask: are we through dealing with XML yet? Although many of us wish we could consume the web through a magic programmer portal that shields us and our code from all the pointy angle brackets, the reality that is the legacy of HTML, Atom and RSS on the web leaves us little choice but to soldier on. So let’s take a look at what Ruby-colored armor is available to us as we continue our quest to slay the XML dragons. Background Historically, Ruby has had a number of options for dealing with structured markup, though oddly none have reached a solid consensus among Ruby developers as the “go to” library. The earliest avail

Key-Value Stores in Ruby: The Wrap Up
This last article in our key-value series will briefly cover a few interesting topics that could each have had full articles of their own. This means that if they seem interesting to you, follow the links that I provide to get more information on them. Lastly, I’ll wrap up by introducing Moneta, written by Yehuda Katz, which provides a unified API for a wide variety of different Key-Value Stores. If you want to write code that allows the user to choose the store to use, you’ll want to pay attention to Moneta. The difficult part of discussing Key-Va

Rails Roadshow Coming Home!
Earlier this month, the Engine Yard crew took a quick trip around the states, stopping in five different cities to talk about Rails Performance in the Cloud. We visited Boston, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles and Seattle, and met with a great crowd of technologists in each. We were joined by some of our favorite technology partners, who talked about cloud computing and their different performance-related products. The Roadshow was a fantastic success; attendee

Programming Contest! And the Challenge is…Measure Rails Momentum
We announced the Worst App Server Ever (WASE) contest last week, as the second in a series of Engine Yard programming contests. Since then, we’ve heard lots about your efforts to put a basic twitterbot together, and now the time has come to describe the challenge computation. Remember: you have until 5 p.m. Monday to complete your calculations! UPDATE: Challenge calculations submissions should be in the form of a RETWEET to @engineyard of the first mess

Using the Rubygems Bundler for Your App
The new Rubygems bundler makes managing your application’s gem dependencies easy. And for applications with many components, it makes separating components’ dependencies easy too. Let’s start off with a simple, two-part application. Part 1 is a Sinatra app that puts JSON-serialized messages into an AMQP queue. Part 2 is a daemon that consumes those messages. Here’s what a Gemfile for this application might look like: gem 'json' gem 'sinatra' source 'http://gems.github.com' gem 'famoseagle-carrot', :require_as => 'carrot' gem 'eventmachine' gem 'amqp' The Sinatra app starts off