Factorial

I was writing a reply on a blog, and I had to find a good expression for next generation of open source. I ended up reviewing the history of free,open source and everything in between

free software(Free Software Foundation)

open source, thats too generic, we need some differentiators now

restricted open source(GPL, restrictive to use for commercially, restrictive to distribute, etc)

unrestricted open source (MIT,WTFL, LGPL?)
But what I wanted to express was beyond these, community needs to be involved at every possible level and probably a cool name like AJAX which made web 2.0 happening.

"Democratic Open Source", the word the looks interesting but open source is more of a meritocracy determined group and may end up alienating quarter of the world, not being able to part of the party(pun intended).

"Participatory Open Source", this is closest github style open source project hosting, easy to host, fork, push, pull, watch.

I know it would have been difficult to absolute loose control over your project, on but it would be like zen, nirvana, enlightenment, rubicon or orgasm, whichever word makes your brain feel happy and right.

It needs lot of courage but my favourite project ruby on rails has done it, but I would love if MRI ruby, ruby enterprise and other open source projects become participatory open source

There was never a great idea or big plan when we started RailsFactory, it was some beliefs we had and more people(clients and team) believed in us and joined us, hope we become a phenomenon in coming years.

now we have good plans and a great team to execute it

watch this space for some great announcements in coming weeks

I have just imported soap4r subversion into github

http://github.com/railsfactory/soap4r/tree/master

git clone git://github.com/railsfactory/soap4r.git

hope soap4r development moves to github soon

We at Railsfactory have 2 full time system administrators and they have enough time to spare for open-source community. We will be happy to help on any of the following tasks,

Installation of Different Flavors of Linux
Installation and trouble shooting of Ruby & Rails
Amazon EC2 configuration & readymade Rails stack images
Gem related issues
MySQL - Database installation
Replication of Database (Master-Master, aster-Slave)
Installation & configuration of Webservers like Apache, Nginx
Name-based & IP-based Virtual hosting
mongrel & mongrel_cluster service
Network Monitoring tools installation
Configuring DNS servers
Applying operating system updates, patches, and configuration changes
Troubleshooting any reported problems


Please send your queries to techsupport at railsfactory dot org

We at RailsFactory are now supporting the development and testing of actionwebservice

http://www.actionwebservice.info

if you have any Enterprise Application which needs special features on actionwebservice for soap compatibility, improved exception handling, scalability we can help, contact us at dinesh (at) railsfactory.org

Although we at RailsFactory do exciting stuff everyday, have been lazy to update the latest on our website. What ever we have in our official web-site were almost 12 months old and we are working on the total re-model of our website to showcase our potential.

Before we launch our updated web-site on or before July-10, would like to list out the recent activities that we engage with,

Releases on May:

Bigadda - Music portal re-design, optimization & performance tuning - May 25
Umong - Final Sprint. - May 30

Releases on June:

Admyself - Proof of concept done successfully by June-20.
Getamajorrecorddeal - Beta release on June-27
Trustys - Alpha release on June-30 . Expected launch July 2nd week.
For July :

We have another couple of projects to be released by mid of July. Will keep the latest posted here.

As the RoR community around the globe meets at the RailsConf - Portland , no surprise to spot Senthil, CTO-RailsFactory, there.

Senthil's long wait is over when he had chance to meet DHH in the RailsConf and I believe this should be a great experience for him.

I am in US now, have come here for RailsConf

the thing which brings me here is meeting the community people, developers, clients, networking

this year is going to be a turning point rails 2 adoption has picked up and so is comptition from merb, but what is turning out is new ruby distributions jruby, rubinious, ruby enterprise(launched this railsconf) and rails runner(thin, ebb, passenger aka mod_rails )

want to meet me on railsconf text me/ call me on +1 415 490 8700 or email me at senthil (at) railsfactory.org

will be updating which sessions I plan to attend

We have joined the GIT band wagon

and have hosted our first public repository on github.

Codes would be in form of snippets, libraries, plugins, and full implementations. All these code are licensed as MIT license, unless until explicitly mentioned.

http://github.com/railsfactory/railsfactory-public/

git clone git://github.com/railsfactory/railsfactory-public.git

update: 20th April 2008
I am commiting myself to opensouring more code from our project and ensure one useful commit per day, for atleast next 100 days
support my efforts by donating if you feel the code is useful for you and your projects

codes which have been commited

a) grouped
converting array data to hash, like with group by with count(*) in sql

b) ActionController logger
logging in following format for processing by linux commands
#method|URL|session_id | timestamp | IP | Status | Controller | action | id |parameters | 0.00075 (1338 reqs/sec)| Rendering: 1.62710 (99%) | DB: 0.00000 (0%) |

c) file joiner
merging files of same file extension for script based processing, to know the usage of a code like a css class, a helper method, code duplication finding for refactoring,

d) find
ruby based grep style searching for source code files

e) filelisting
syntax checking of ruby and embedded ruby(erb/ rhtml) files

f) od2
inspired from linux od command
displays the file and line number and the octal character representation of the non-ASCII characters

g) typo generator
typo generation for use with search engines

Amazon should have named it ScalableDB instead of SimpleDB.
simple actually means, zero learning curve, standard features and sample code to get started.

this time around Amazon did not offer any ruby library, nor any ruby specific code on their getting started guide(php,perl,dotnet,java got their share).
So I am building a ruby ActiveRecord interface to SimpleDB, as all our apps are rails driven

What I wanted
my idea is not moving the whole database to simpledb but move only certain large tables and denormalise them as per requirements.

I see a good use for this style app in user generated content space, like fickr, youtube, digg, facebook.

what I missed initially, datatypes(date, numeric, blobs), lack of schema and thus validations.

I have tried to solve my itch and solution for scalability for our clients.

completion state
I have implemented the following

a) creating new instance and saving them
c) schema enforcement(SimpleDB does not do schema)
d) Validation
e) simple find
f) find all(1+ N requests currently)

pending features
things which I plan to build in coming days

a) simple query
b) update(only save works, need to get the update syntax right)

build one large app(in terms of content) with minimal effort leveraging EC2, SimpleDB and S3

We are excited to organize the first AWS Chennai Event at our Office

Jinesh Waria will be the Keynote Speaker from Amazon

Thanks Labsji, Sid, Narain, ahmed and all people supporting the event.

I will put up a map and markers

over thirty participants have already registered, would love to see you all

Ref - Links

AWS in India - December 2007

Jinesh Varia India Dec 2007

AWS chennai wiki

Participants

when you work on cutting edge technologies and suddenly realize you are the front runner, it feels amazing.

last week opensocial was launched with google organising a group of social networking sites and vendors for a showdown against Facebook Apps.

I went through available commentary on blogs and documentation on OpenSocial.

opensocial, html/js based solution is still a very desktop(y) solution which google is targetting, widget style apps which can integrate with its google desktop and social networking applications, it does not offer the hosted app interactivity which facebook is offering.

I am pleased to find their proposed/developed system is very similar to what we(me and my team) have built for my client, I started planning on 3rd party Applications since last october(2006), but the implemention was developed during April to July 2007.

while we were developing Facebook apps was launched(24th May), I made a concious effort not to use facebook(and apps) and not get influenced in implementation and architecture.

There are some fundamental problems which you encounter developing a system with 3rd party apps. Facebook way of solution is superior to what opensocial is offering, but handling privacy and content access at a 1 to 1 level would be a big challenge. Only when they are able to offer it, these social platfoms will become SAAS marketplace and would be lucrative to developers and these networks themselves.

Though there are many others who are building or pledged to build Facebook, OpenSocial apps, we have built the application with a system which supports these integrations.

though our app is now nearly ready, but it is still not open to public, but I can say "Been there Done that"

So if you have really tough problems, talk to us( railsfactory@gmail.com ), hope we can get a simple implementable solution for you. We can do Facebook, OpenSocial integration for your Rails Apps(we are starting a Facebook integration for another client)

this week there is lot of storm and blog articles on CDBaby switching to PHP story

CDBaby was one of the initial poster child and got more attention than it probably it deserved due to being a pioneering project.

it is clients perogative to change his mind on which technology to use or which projects to scrap.

I am not going to raise any issue about capability of the developer, I know Jeremy Kempers contrbution to Rails

Anybody who has worked in software industry knows the reasons for project failures.

Rails have come a long way in last 2 years.

Rails has made a huge difference in how web applications are built, it has taken the drudge out of coding.

There are two eras in web development, one pre-rails and post rails. Ruby on Rails is one of the most influential development idea in recent times, there are more language ports (cakephp/grails) and inspired frameworks, and has influenced the developer expectations to a new high from development tools and frameworks.

But at RailsFactory we are a firm believer in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, we are yet to face a problem which we could not have been able to solve.

if your Rails project is troubled, please contact us( railsfactory (at) gmail dot com ), let us discuss on how to bring your project back on track.

I last installed mephisto many months back for a client.

Now when we required our own blog, I turned to Mephisto.

I faced few problems and but the solutions were simple

downloaded mephisto 0.7.3 Noh-Varr (Bug fixes)

http://s3.amazonaws.com/mephisto-blog/mephisto-0.7.3.tar.gz

I froze my rails version to edge

rake rails:freeze:edge

active resource is not installed when freezing rails so you need do checkout seperately on export from a edge checkout

running gave few errors here are their fixes, mainy due to changes in rails edge a some code has been extracted out of the core

act as list

ruby script/plugin install http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/acts_as_list/

Paginator error

install classic_pagination

ruby script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/classic_pagination

login template error
/app/admin/login.rhtml

changed

<% form_tag({:controller=>:account, :action=>:login}, { :id => 'login_form' }) do -%>

to   

<% form_tag({:controller=>"account", :action=>"login"}, { :id => 'login_form' }) do -%>

 

undefined method 'redirect_to_url' for #<AccountController:0x4be21e4 >

changes as per new version in technoweenie's act as authenticated

in  lib/authenticated_system

#location_stored? ? redirect_to_url(session[:return_to]) : redirect_to(default)

      redirect_to(location_stored? ? session[:return_to] : default)

additions to act as paranoid plugin

def extract_options_from_args!(args) #nodoc

args.last.is_a?(Hash) ? args.pop : {}

end

App is ready

Theme

added scriblish theme from

http://www.quotedprintable.com/pages/scribbish

and added to /themes/site-1/ and configured in admin area

added deploy scripts and configuration for dreamhost deploy and added to our svn and deployed