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Trubee is launched for public and more updates

2008-11-18T14:41:00Z

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.

so Cute

2008-10-19T22:51:00Z

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.

ActivContacts

2008-10-19T22:46:00Z

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

convention over configuration

2008-08-25T02:58:00Z

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.

ActiveRecord 2.x patches for submission

2008-08-25T02:35:00Z

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

participatory open source

2008-08-11T01:00:00Z

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

RailsFactory is 2 years old

2008-08-06T05:41:00Z

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

soap4r git

2008-08-01T01:28:00Z

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

Get System Admin Support for free

2008-07-09T12:46:00Z

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

ActionWebService for Enteprise 2.0

2008-07-09T04:17:00Z

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

Projects & Status by end of June-08

2008-06-30T08:56:00Z

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.

Senthil with Ruby On Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson

2008-05-31T15:03:00Z

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.

Attending RailsConf 2008

2008-05-24T05:19:00Z

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

railsfactory-public project on github

2008-04-15T05:37:00Z

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
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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

SimpleDB AKA ScalableDB

2008-01-24T10:11:00Z

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