September 2008 Archives
This is yet another entry that’s targeted at SMU students doing IS203. Working on a group project of this scale gets very difficult for students, even though it can be easier. As often is the case, spending some time on researching the right way can save you a lot of time in the long run. Plus, you will probably score better as a result. Less work for better grades, are you listening yet?
Here are 8 tips that save you time & increase productivity, ignore at your own peril.
Continue Reading…
Posted by Jaryl Sim on Sep 25, 2008
We’ve just upgraded the server to use this excellent gem, which allows Ruby on Rails applications to be served like PHP applications. Previously, updating Rails applications entails a lot administrative hassle. Managing mongrel clusters was a huge burden to deploy and monitor and we had to do it every time we wanted to deploy the latest changes to the application.
Of greater concern was its wanton consumption of memory. I brought the MediaTemple server down after running 9 mongrels concurrently and had to reboot it in order to restore the system. From what I gather, Passenger, is an Apache mod, so pages are served by Apache rather than a mongrel server daemon that runs in the background.
Apache takes care of multiple concurrent requests, and through Passenger we can define the number of instances available to serve up incoming requests. I haven’t done any real benchmarks, but overall, memory consumption is markedly lower and speeds are up due to efficient caching. Furthermore, Ruby Enterprise Edition, a fork of the Ruby runtime can also be used to decrease memory consumption, which is what we’re going to explore next.
Also, I’ve updated the Hibernate/NetBeans series with part two.
Posted by Jaryl Sim on Sep 17, 2008
Actually not quite, I’ve written a couple of articles, mainly for fellow students at the university. See, this semester, the year twos will be taking a module in software engineering, where we will be implementing a facility booking system in Java. Since the project requires us to work with Subversion and databases, I thought it was a good thing to write these two articles:
Do spread the word if you find them useful, and report any glaring errors or improvements if any. Apologies for still not having a commenting system up yet. Mainly because the last time I tried it, the code generated by the Radiant plug-in was not standards compliant. Since producing compliant markup is one of the competitive advantages we have at Tinkerbox, I decided against installing it.
I’ve had some experience with Java back in the polytechnic, but I was won over by the dark side with .Net and its popular C# language. Ken is also an awesome J2ME developer and is far more experienced than I am with Java. Right now, he wishes to develop some stuff on the iPhone but that’s another story.
While I still prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, I guess brushing up on my Java wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But then again, I miss the simplicity of ActiveRecord a lot. Most people think that Hibernate is more powerful, or more flexible, but I think ActiveRecord can hold its own. Yes, you might have to tweak a lot, but then again, it’s not going to end up more work than using Hibernate with all its configuration files (or annotations). Perhaps, I will be in a better position to comment after this semester’s done.
Posted by Jaryl Sim on Sep 13, 2008