It has been months(nearly 6 months -> half an year) since any post has been published here and I am going to give an excuse(even I hate some times) that we were quite busy with our applications. You know how many? Not 1 or 2 but 5. Yes 5. Most of these apps are in final phases for public release and visit us back in less than 2-weeks to know more about the applications and clients feedback.

Happy to share that we added Sweden, Japan and Croatia to our clients geographies list which already has US, Canada, UK, Australia, Singapore. Very focused and friendly clients.

Although we are hearing recession every where, we at RailsFactory still hiring(we are into the 50 mark now) and finalizing deal for a new(bigger and better) office space. Lot more enquiries and mostly through references. We are confident that, as long as we do the job professional, we will have more work and help more startups around the globe to leave their foot print in the Web 2.0. "Word of Mouth" references don't bend with recession and zero marketing expense.

Happy to share that couple of our projects got limelight and featured in Techcrunch in less than 2-weeks span.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/08/trustys-yelp-meets-linkedin-for-blue-collar-workers

Kit is a perfectionist and who always know what he wants. He never compromise on quality and we gave our best of efforts. We wish him all the very best for Trustys success.

And the other we can't disclose with our contract agreement with the development firm. This is one of the most challenging project we worked and we are equally happy for the client and wish him the very best.

What is equally Interesting is we are cooking another 3 projects for our clients and we believe days are not far away for those to be talked about in the Internet community.

Lot of interesting things were happening in Railsfactory past 1-month and here is the summary,

• Trubee – ( Trubee.com ) lunched for production and would like to thank my client & Friend Anshuman who was passionate about his application and available on-line with the team most of our working hours. Also Moen for providing a wonderful UI. I would like to congratulate the dev-team who done tremendous job in getting the application to production in less than 45 working days from scratch.

• ActivContacts – Application which we contested in railsrumble, got Rank-17 out of 135+ participants. I am confidant that we would have been in the top-10 if we would have settled for 1 app instead of 2. But the encouraging thing is we completed both the applications within the specified 48 hrs successfully. Do expect us on the Top-5 next railsrumble.

• Senthil and team started with their R&D on iPhone applications. Soon expect us on the mobile application space.

• WritersNeeded is released for private beta. It should be available for public in less than couple of weeks.

• Jujube ( jujubeaccounting.com ) Canada based accounting package(hosted application) released for public beta. Will be releasing the full fledged application in few weeks.

Checkout this space for more updates on the happening things @ RF.

soCute is a tumblog targeted towards parents who want to upload their kids photos photos, video, audio and comments

a simple web interface has been built, you can also post content via email from desktop and mobile phones(email or mms)

try the interface with the demo login and feel for yourself

if you like the application please vote for us

http://cute.r08.railsrumble.com/

inspiration I created a blog for my Dad, who is in his sixties, so that he can create his autobiography. I used wordpress, but clicking many forms and links was kind of difficult and he would sometime confuse himself, so I created a blog entry UI via flickr, since then he has added hundreds of images and comments on his site http://www.athimoolam.com

simple intuitive ui makes user excited and makes him use it often.

most parents have created gigabytes of digital content created of their kids, which they want to publish or share it with friends and family. hope a service like soCute makes it easy for them to publish often

we plan to add more features in coming weeks with a formal limited beta for friends and family.

This is one of our entry for RailsRumble 2008

Over the period of time we people use multiple phone numbers and emails for communication. With that arises situation where we may loose our contacts when a phone number or email is changed.

ActivContacts need on situations:

* I sent an email to my friend after a long time and it got bounced. Is he not using this email ID anymore?
* I have changed my mobile number and want a common place where people can get my ActivContact number.
* I travel a lot and cannot use my same number all around the globe. But still want my people to keep in touch with me when needed.
* I am moving back to Chennai from Bangalore and can't inform everyone. Need a place where people can get my current contact details with my Bangalore number.
* No more I work for XYZCompany and dont have private email ID's of my colleagues. Still want to keep in touch.
* My email account got hacked and no more can access my emails. Want my contacts to get my new email.
* The customer service number I had for my electornic item no longer exists.

Ofcourse we know there are many other reasons for some one to be here...

We tried to solve this problem with our concept ActivContacts where people are linked with their past and present email ID's / Phones Numbers. Hope this application ActivContacts will address this problem and opens door for other new Ideas.

Thanks RaisRumble team for giving us the opportunity to showcase our capability.

Expect this app to be launched soon in beta on http://www.activcontacts.com

when we embraced Rails couple of years back, the one feature which we loved was convention over configuration. which made getting started very easy.

but many times the convention may be good for most users but for many large applications these are just training wheels, which must me optimized in production for the problem/bottleneck the app faces

ActiveRecord cache preference
for one project we have noticed significant memory increase, which we could attribute to ActiveRecord Caching. Thanks for good logging capability in Rails

ActiveRecord include preference
eager loading behavior has changed, it no more does big joins(unless it has dependents), this is based on feedback from many users, also possibly very true for mysql based startup apps.

but our app works with oracle and a large dataset, all db tuning and optimizations were done for rails 1.2 defaults. now suddenly we have hundreds of small query and when we add caching, lot more memory usage and slower performance.

ActiveRecord Dirty Tracking a very cool feature which can get performance improvements on update queries, but if you are upgrading a old app, and you use update_attribute in many places will need you to add
model_instance.attribute_name_will_change! .

a better solution would be either dirty tracking disabled(that is possible ) or Model.will_change or model_instance.will_change!

we have overridden these behavior and have solved our problems, but we believe these can be useful for other large applications as well

Background
RailsFactory is over 2 years old and we are amongst the most experienced Rails Teams around. Most of our projects are new development(including porting from other technologies), but recently we worked on a rails migration for a very large client application, which gave us insights on what enterprises want from ruby and rails.

I have submitted one ticket and patch to rails

checkbox generation with "false"

I plan to submit more patches in coming days

ActiveRecord::Base.sanitize_sql

sanitize sql is used for escaping custom sql built with user input.

behaviour has changed in rails 2 when compared to rails 1.2

Rails 2.1
>>ActiveRecord::Base.sanitize_sql("")
=>nil

Rails 1.2
>>ActiveRecord::Base.sanitize_sql("")
=>""


ActiveRecord cache preference
ActiveRecord include preference

will be adding description and ticket numbers soon

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