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Just found out the hard way that if your Rails app can’t contact New Relic, it blocks your mongrels and brings down your app. Teenormous t-shirts is hosted on Slice Host and I believe there were network connectivity issues between my slice and New Relic and I was not the only one.

First Rule Of Monitoring: Do not bring down the application!

Needless to say, New Relic will most likely no longer be a part of my monitoring solution.

UPDATE: The issue appears to be related to DNS resolution at New Relic and there is a work around to prevent DNS lookup by hard-coding the IP (http://support.newrelic.com/discussions/support/480-why-didnt-you-announce-the-problems-with-rpm-this-morning). The folks at New Relic saw this post and setup a conference call to discuss the issues. I am impressed with this level of customer service. They believe New Relic will no longer cause issues for an application now that the DNS issues are resolved and they informed me they are actively working on improving the way this works in the application. Thanks to their impressive support and follow-through, I may give New Relic a try again in the future. For now, I am going to sit on the sidelines for a bit and only use it in development though.

I just noticed I am listed on the Thinking Sphinx contributors list!

All this stemmed from a post to the Thinking Sphinx mailing list related to facet support. Looking through the Sphinx code, you would be hard pressed to detect a lineage to my code but I must have contributed something to that final incarnation to deserve a credit.

Also, I noticed in a follow-up post I even got a “you rule!” for that same post. Just goes to show your voice can be heard.

Teenormous.com is a t-shirt search engine which just went live yesterday. My friend Brian Pipa of Candy Addict fame and I have been cranking away for the past several months to make this happen. The site has almost 15,000 shirts already and many more features and t-shirts are on the way. Stop by and check it out. Feedback is welcome.

You can read the official announcement from the Teenormous blog.

Now that I’m back from the Ajax Experience Boston conference and had a little time to let the information settle, I would like to share some of the highlights. You can get the slides here for all of the presentations . Here are some thoughts on a few of the presentations that I found noteworthy.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a framework to allow you to store and retrieve information locally in a web browser. The main motivation behind this framework is to provide a way to allow web applications to still work without internet access. It makes perfect sense that Google is growing this framework since they are planning on using it with their apps such as GMail and Google Docs. It is worth noting that Google says this tool is not ready for production consumption at this time as it is just a developer preview.

Google Gears attempts a worthy goal of addressing a major flaw with web apps by providing a way for them to still work offline. However, there are two major drawbacks to this approach that may give you pause in choosing to use it:

1. It requires your users to install a browser extension to work.
2. It requires you to either implement your data access logic in pure Javascript using something like a REST api for the online mode, or you are required to implement your data access logic twice.

In addition, the implementation of Google Gears stores a local sqlite database so you will also have to manage versioning and upgrading any schema changes to that local database independent of your server application.

Google Gears provides a pretty novel approach to providing an offline mode to your web app. It should be interesting to see how this framework develops.

Javascript Frameworks and Libraries Galore

There were lots of great talks on a bunch of the major Javascript frameworks and libraries including, Prototype, script.aculo.us, JQuery, Dojo, ExtJS, and many others.

Prototype and Scriptaculous

Stuart Halloway of Relevance gave several great talks on the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. We both live in Raleigh, NC so I have had the pleasure of seeing him give a presentation before at a local Ruby meetup.

I have more experience working with these two libraries than any of the others that were at this conference since I found them by way of Ruby On Rails. As a result, I did not learn a whole lot of new information, but since Stuart is an excellent presenter I found these to be some of my favorite presentations. Some of the more interesting bits occurred during the Q and A. If you ever want to push his “rant” button, ask him about Javascript 2… very entertaining.

JQuery

I attended a couple of sessions by JQuery’s creator John Resig. When JQuery first came out I tried it out and was impressed by its elegance but ended up choosing Prototype and Scriptaculous since it was baked-in to RubyOnRails. However, nothing can beat seeing a presentation by the creator of a framework.

JQuery was a pioneer in using CSS selectors for accessing the DOM via Javascript. Many of the other frameworks have since followed suit. For example, to select all anchors that are within a paragraph tag you could do: $(’p a’)

I wasn’t looking for a new Javascript library to replace Prototype and Scriptaculous, but JQuery is a compelling alternative. Some of the main things about JQuery that speak to me are:

1. It does not pollute the global Javascript namespace. This makes it really easy to combine libraries together. You can even use multiple different versions of JQuery together if you want to (not that I can imagine needing to but it is cool nonetheless).
2. It has elegant and concise apis. When you obtain an element via the $(’some_el’) call, it returns a wrapped JQuery object that contains lots of JQuery methods to manipulate that element. In addition, most JQuery methods return JQuery objects so you can chain them together.
3. It has a well-defined and actively used plugin framework. There are a bunch of great plugins. And because of the well-defined extension points, plugin methods are easy to find and blend well with the standard JQuery api. For example, to turn a form into an ajax form using the form plugin it’s as simple as: $(’someform’).ajaxForm();
4. There is a JQuery UI project for UI widgets and an upcoming JQuery FX project for special effects. Also, the animation implementation used by JQuery is very efficient as it uses a single shared event loop rather than creating Intervals for each event.

Dojo

Alex Russell the creator of the Dojo Toolkit gave a talk as well. Unfortunately I was unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict with my co-worker, Ryan Breen’s, Ajax Performance Analysis presentation. During a panel discussion, the Dojo framework was referred to as “the kitchen sink” of the Javascript frameworks, so if you can’t find what you are looking for elsewhere there is a good chance you can find it in here.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Chris Shalk gave a presentation on the Google Web Toolkit. GWT allows a developer to create an entire Ajax application from start to finish completely in Java. All of the Javascript and HTML are generated by Java.

One benefit of using this framework is that if you already know Java and don’t want to bother learning other technologies such as Javascript you can dive right in. In addition, you have all of the wide array of Java tools and debuggers available to help in your development. I personally don’t have a need for this framework but if you only like to write in Java this might be right for you. However, if that is the case I would highly recommend branching out and trying something new… you just might like it.

Closing Remarks

This was just a brief summary of the highlights of the conference off the top of my head. There were several other interesting technologies and presentations that I did not discuss since this post is already way longer than I intended it to be. All in all I would say this conference was an excellent way to catch up to date on the latest web development technologies.

I am in Boston this week to attend the Ajax Experience conference.

My co-worker Ryan Breen is presenting a session on Ajax performance techniques. There are also several discussions from some of the heavy-weights in the Javascript world including Alex Russell the creator of Dojo and John Resig the creator of JQuery. Should be some interesting content and I am looking forward to it.

I just found a nice light-weight syntax highlighter called the Google Syntax Highlighter by Alex Gorbatchev. It is 100% client-side written in Javascript so it is extremely portable. I can already think of a few good uses for it starting with being the preferred highlight solution for this blog. This replaces the iG:Syntax Hiliter which is quite nice and powerful, but I am not nuts about the way it looks by default and too lazy to customize the style sheet. I went ahead and converted the last few articles to use it so you can see it in action below.

Also, if you happen to be on WordPress, you can just grab the Google Syntax Highlighter Plugin for WordPress.

Now on to creating some content that needs highlighting.

UPDATE: One pretty big drawback to this approach to highlighting is the code will not be highlighted until after the page loads. In the case of this blog, I am using the WordPress plugin so this highlighter is the last piece to run. This has resulted in a perceived load time for the blog that is much slower than if this highlighting was done server-side. As a result, I am probably going to move this blog back to a server-side solution with some customizations. I will share the details when I do.

It is worth mentioning that the Google syntax highlighter could probably be sped-up with a few customizations such as: bundling all the js in one file and compressing it, moving it higher up the load stack, and the Google Syntax highligher could be customized to render each element at load time instead of rendering the whole page at the end.

UPDATE 2: I am no longer using this plugin. I think the major slow-down is due to the multiple split JS files since each file blocks while executing. I switched to the Google Code Prettify which is much easier to use.

So, I finally got around to converting this site off of Typo. All permalinks should still work. I did not migrate the comments over however.

I chose Typo because I had bought into the hype like everyone else and thought since I am actively working with Rails I should be using a blog written in Rails. Well, since then the creator of Typo has moved on from the project and even his blog is now using Mephisto. But the main reason I migrated from Typo is it just doesn’t have the usability and features of a more mature blogging engine such as WordPress. It was almost painful to write a post in.

At first I spent a few days converting this blog to Mephisto to try to keep it in the Rails family only to find out that the memory requirements for Mephisto are roughly 47MB per fcgi! I think that may have more to do with Rails 1.2 than with Mephisto though but I haven’t spent any time digging in. In any case, beware if you are on a shared host as Mephisto currently is not supported in that environment.

The conversion process was a snap thanks to WordPress’s RSS importer. The rough steps I took were:

1. Modify Typo’s xml_controller to increase the maximum number of articles in the articles feed. It just has to be greater than the number of posts you have.
2. Log into your WordPress admin section and click Import -> RSS.
3. To keep your links the same, you will need to change your WordPress Options -> Permalinks to Date and name based. Then to allow the “articles” portion of Typo urls, you can add this to the generated .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress install:

   RewriteBase /articles
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule articles/(.*) /index.php/$1 [L]

I just ran across an interesting feature of gmail. You can append a + sign and random text to the end of your existing gmail email address and gmail will send it to your existing gmail account. For example, if your gmail acount was fakeemail@gmail.com, then you could send email to fakeemail+nospam@gmail.com and you will still receive it. You can then setup a gmail filter to move these emails into the trash, or tag them with a label, etc.

I have been using this a lot lately when signing up with various accounts. I also setup a separate notification email address that I use to send automated notifications with a monitoring script when any of my sites are down (more details on this monitoring script to follow in a future post).

After seeing one too many sites named with a trailing r, similar to Flickr, my friend Brian and I decided to start cataloguing them on a website. The site is called rdiculous.com to poke a little fun at this bizarre web2.0 website naming trend. It is incredible how many there are and we have just started to scratch the surface.

Stop on by and check it out at rdiculous.com. We are posting more of them nearly every day, so if you know of any that we missed please drop us a line.