Rails Snippets - 11/7

Troubleshooting Ruby Processes: Leveraging System Tools when the Usual Ruby Tricks Stop Working

A new book from O’Reilly on troubleshooting Ruby (and Rails) apps. From the overview:

This short cut introduces key system diagnostic tools to Ruby developers creating and deploying web applications. When programmers develop a Ruby application they commonly experience complex problems which require some understanding of the underlying operating system to be solved. Difficult to diagnose, these problems can make the difference between a project’s failure or success. This short cut demonstrates how to leverage system tools available on Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, BSD or any other Unix flavor. You will learn how to leverage the raw power of tools such as lsof, strace or gdb to resolve problems that are difficult to diagnose with the standard Ruby development tools. You will also find concrete examples that illustrate how these tools solve real-life problems in Ruby development. This expertise will prove especially relevant during the deployment phase of your application. In this way, should your production Mongrel cluster freeze and stop serving HTTP requests, it will not take you 2 days to figure out why!

Sitepoint: Preparing for Rails 2.0

A nice, if a bit short, article on some of the changes that are coming in Rails 2.0. This is focused on what you will need to change in your application.

Creating a Ruby Weblog in 10 Minutes

This is a beginner tutorial, specific to using Netbeans 6.0. I’ve not played much with the Rails support in Netbeans, but it looks impressive so far.