WebProNews » Ruby on Rails

FiveRuns Receives $6.2 Million In Funding

Doug Caverly — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:39:12 +0000

It would have been more fitting (in terms of alliteration) if FiveRuns had gotten around $5 million in funding. Instead, the company, which works with Ruby on Rails, did especially well and took in $6.2 million.

Austin Ventures is behind the investment, and although you may not have heard of the companies this firm has supported – Agere Systems, Dazel, Waveset – you’ve probably heard of the corporations that tend to acquire them – Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems. This bodes well for the future of FiveRuns.

In a statement, Olivier Thierry, the president and CEO of FiveRuns, also added, “All of the industry signposts are pointing to Rails becoming a significant framework for web application development. FiveRuns is squarely positioned to augment this wave by delivering products in support of its growth. . . . [W]e continue to support the Rails community as the adoption accelerates.”

Thierry only recently came by the right to include himself in FiveRuns’s “we” – he, along with Dean Cruse and Steve Sanderson, are fresh additions to the team. All three men have extensive backgrounds in software, however. Cruse will serve as vice president of marketing and Sanderson will act as the vice president of development and technology.

Perhaps, with all these things going its way, FiveRuns’s next announcement will relate to a feat in the neighborhood of $50 million.

Adobe Bows Ruby On Rails RIA SDK

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:11:44 +0000

The SDK from Adobe combines the Ruby on Rails rich Internet application (RIA) framework with the Flex 2 technology and tools for web developers.

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Adobe would like to see Ruby on Rails developers give Flex a try.

The SDK from Adobe arrived this week, as the company’s Mike Potter revealed in his blog:

Following a similar release to the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe that I announced last month, today I’m happy to announce that I’m releasing a similar project for those of you interested in Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex.

With the help of Derek Wischusen, who has written all the samples in the SDK, today I’m announcing the creation of an open source project to help Ruby on Rails developers get started with Adobe Flex. The initial release of the SDK contains four samples, each with various degrees of complexity.

Potter and Wischusen have chosen to host the Ruby on Rails SDK on Google’s Project Hosting site.

They have made the SDK available for developers under terms of the New BSD License.

Wischusen also blogged about the SDK, and listed more information about it:

Currently, the SDK contains a sample demonstrating: (1) Intergrating with a database, basic CRUD, and rails migrations. (2) Uploading and downloading files. (3) Downloading data directly from Flex and sending data to a new browser window directly from Flex. (4) a simple Directory Explorer. The last sample uses WebORB for integrating Flex with Rails.

Both sites were referenced by Peter Cooper on his Ruby Inside blog.

Cooper provides plenty of quality links to Ruby resources, and also displays the Latest Ruby Links feed from Dzone, a developer topic-focused site that collects submitted developer topics and promotes them to its front page via user voting.

Cooper also referenced a rundown of changes arriving with Rails 1.2.

New features will be part of the release, which Cooper speculates will be available in mid-October.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Nineteen Rails Secrets To Web Development

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:19:58 +0000

Ruby on Rails has increased in popularity among web developers seeking a solid framework for their applications, and some helpful hints can make it even better.

A number of resources for the Ruby on Rails framework have arrived online since its debut. The Ruby Inside blog, maintained by English web developer Peter Cooper since May 29th of this year, offers some nice insights into Rails and the underlying Ruby object-oriented language.

His latest post comes in a format most people always enjoy finding online – the list. Cooper’s list of “19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don’t Know” suits that very well.

One Cooper noted, the acts_as_nested_set, made its quiet debut in Rails:

It’s much like acts_as_tree, but with the added benefit that you can select all of the children (and their own descendants) of a node with a single query. A list of the instance methods is available.

A couple of conversion tricks, like using the array method to_sentence, or the number helpers, have their place. An array of related terms like names can be rendered as a sentence. For numbers, helpers offer nifty shortcuts like formatting a number in currency format, or setting delimiters for them.

One useful speed trick can be accomplished for an application that has unchanging data from restart to restart, Cooper wrote:

If you have data that doesn’t change between application restarts, cache it in a constant somewhere. For example, you might have a YAML or XML file in /config that stores application configuration data, and you could load it into a constant in environment.rb, making lookups quick and easy application-wide.

Cooper also touched on a small framework, BackgrounDRb, that will be recognizable for its utility. This daemon allows the Rails application to send it tasks, and the daemon will complete them in the background.

“It’s extremely powerful, and useful for many tasks such as sending hundreds of e-mails, fetching URLs, and other things you don’t want to slow down the request times for your main app,” said Cooper.

Be sure to check out the rest of Cooper’s list for more excellent insights into working with Rails more effectively.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.