Now, Salesforce has announced that it is acquiring Heroku for about $212 million. Heroku is a cloud application platform powered by Ruby. In fact, according to Salesforce, it’s the fastest growing platform of its type. 

The acquisition would make perfect sense for the company given its increased focus on social cloud-based enterprise apps. The platform powers over 106,000 social and mobile cloud apps. In fact, the company claims that developers added 2,600 new apps to the platform last week alone. 

The company points out that there are over a million developers developing on Ruby, and that the language was used to write things like Groupon, Hulu, and Twitter. 

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," added Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of January, and is subject to customary closing conditions.

Have you wanted to become more comfortable using Flash with Yahoo’s web services? Now you can.

Jeffery Bennett posted the news at Yahoo’s Developer Center blog:

Noted Yahoo staffer and blogger Jeremy Zawodny also noted the debut of the Flash center, along with one for Ruby developers. “What languages should we do next?” he asked in the post, to which several people replied, “Perl.”

Back to Flash. At Yahoo’s new center, a few resources have been made available already to developers. A quartet of how-to articles discuss the ins and outs of performing a Yahoo search, using ActionScript with Yahoo Maps, creating a Yahoo Music Jukebox plug-in, and mashing up Flash with Yahoo’s event service, Upcoming.org.

Several links to useful downloads and other external resources appear at the Flash Developer Center. The site also makes note of what a developer will need to get started with Yahoo:

•  Adobe Flash 8 Professional
•  A Yahoo API Key
•  YahooAPI class and examples
•  An Application ID

After registering that ID with the Yahoo API class, development can begin. Yahoo’s how-to examples take the developer through the process of setting up the event handler, and demonstrating how to invoke, for example, the static Yahoo search method.

Interested developers may wish to make their way to Yahoo’s first public Hack Day on September 29-30. See the site for more details.

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For an example read Joel Spolsky’s report on a Sprint Phone he got to try out cause he’s a blogger.

Now, if Sprint listens to Joel and improves its next product? This will turn into a win. But, for now, I don’t see how this helps Sprint out in any way. Do you?

Free samples are good when it’s a new concept you’re trying to introduce to the marketplace. Sonos, for instance, has gotten great mileage by sending sample units out to bloggers and other influentials. That’s a totally new idea for an audio system and can’t be easily explained through a video – it’s something you need to experience to understand.

Now, if I had a sucky product (or was the #3 search engine like Microsoft) I’d keep bringing influentials in to LISTEN to them and improve the product so that they stop bitching.

Oh, wait, that’s what Microsoft was doing with its MSN Search Champs. They are getting better. Will they ever pass Google? Well “ever” is a long time and Microsoft has a lot of money they can spend on that problem.

Anyway, if all this corporate talk bores you, hey, the Ruby programming language site has a nice spiffy new design! I found out about that over on the Ruby on Rails blog. (Ruby on Rails is the framework that powers a lot of Web 2.0 sites).

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo will carry on their work as part of Sun. The JRuby project is a 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language, which has gained popularity among web developers for building applications.

In joining Sun Microsystems, the developer duo will have the opportunity to clean up and optimize their implementation, and make it more useful for other developers. Nutter discussed that in his post:

Enebo also posted about the move to Sun:

Both Enebo and Nutter noted that JRuby would continue to be an open source product. Sun recognized that the existing Ruby community might not take kindly to disrupting that.

They also credited famed technologist Tim Bray for evangelizing their cause within sun. “Yes, I helped make this happen, and for once, you’re going to be getting the Sun PR party line, because I wrote most of it,” Bray said on his blog.

He also answered the question that will be on the minds of web developers who work with the Ruby On Rails framework for their online applications:

More about JRuby from its creators can be found in a tutorial available online.

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"You know you've been in Sweden too long when"
#124. You accept that you will get parking tickets regularly and stop caring that you have no idea what was wrong with your parking.
-- who knew Sweden had a Jeff Foxworthy clone?

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:

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:

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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I figure that Ruby would be easy to learn because of its similarity to Perl (I’m told). But I also figure that Python would be easy to learn because of its simplicity. And when it comes to webby stuff, I can use Rails with Ruby and Django with Python.

I’m currently leaning toward Python and began doing so last week. I started with Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into Python and made it thru the first 3 chapters pretty quickly. So far it feels pretty good.

Before I really dive in, though, I’m curious to hear what others think about the choice between these two languages.

(On a related note, you might also read Tim Bray’s On Ruby post, since he just started learning Ruby.)

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

If some of this sounds unfamiliar, the SapphireSteel Software website explains things quite nicely. “Steel is a free Ruby language add-in for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005. It provides an editing environment for Ruby programs complete with syntax colouring and the ability to run console applications with one keystroke.”

The business entity has high hopes for its coming product. “We aim to produce the best Windows development tool possible for Ruby. We aim to leverage all the features of Visual Studio: code completion, snippets, IntelliSense, etc.” Don’t expect a grand launch of some finalized, end-all, though.

Referring to its list of goals, the site stated, “to achieve this will take time. We do not intend to have a big-bang’ release; instead, we shall produce a series of beta’ versions at intervals of approximately one to two months, implementing further Visual Studio features and fixing reported bugs in the previous versions.”

It’s also worth the way in which the company is making its products increasingly accessible. Earlier this month, it was announced that “The Little Book of Ruby . . . Huw Collingbourne’s guide to programming Ruby in Ten Chapters,” had been translated into Brazilian Portuguese. That manual is available now.

Would-be Steel users should note that the company isn’t all-inclusive. “The Steel IDE will only run on Windows – not OS X or Linux,” the site states. But it also notes, “there is nothing preventing you from developing under Windows and running the debugged Ruby scripts under other operating systems.”

Older version of Windows will not be allowed, and neither will outdated versions of Visual Studio. “Visual Studio 2005 standard edition or above” and “Windows XP (service pack 2)” are required. On the features and compatibility front, Steel will have “debugging and IntelliSense for Ruby,” and it will provide support for Ruby On Rails.

There’s no word on when exactly Ruby In Steel will be formally introduced.

Update: Huw Collingbourne was kind enough to contact me and point out a development schedule, which you can find here. I appreciate the correction.

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Macromedia Director of Architecture Sean Corfield regularly blogs about ColdFusion and other topics at his site, Corfield.org. His latest blog entry concern’s Tate’s latest publication, “From Java To Ruby.”

Citing Gregg Sporar’s review of the book, Corfield sees some parallels in the book where he believes one could easily do a global find-and-replace to substitute ColdFusion for Ruby throughout the text.

Corfield provided a snippet from Sporar’s review, and replaced Ruby with ColdFusion to demonstrate:

“We’re used to being a niche language (like Smalltalk),” wrote Corfield. “But what an interesting proposition that we could become a mainstream language.”

One commenter, jaaron, on Corfield’s blog illustrated just how Ruby has gained heightened awareness in the coding world while ColdFusion has remained in that niche:

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It’s not hard to find information and tutorials on the net, but as always, assumptions are made, prerequisites are brushed by or ignored entirely, and you can find yourself in a hall of mirrors wondering which one of the reflections is what you really need. No doubt the page you are reading now will have similar deficiencies, so take a deep breath and be prepared for adverse conditions.

The first problem I encountered was mysql. The install steps I followed had me bring down MySQL for OS X Intel and modify my PATH to include /usr/local/mysql/bin. That’s wrong. You actually need your PATH to include /usr/local/mysql-standard-4.1.20-apple-darwin8.5.1-i686/bin/ because that’s where that OS X package puts it. Or at least that’s what I had to do, and that’s why these sorts of articles can lead you astray: things change all the time. Recipes are great, and can sometimes work for those of us without any culinary skills. But when you can’t find any chopped pimento, my wife knows what to do, and I do not. Same with computer software install recipes: if it all works for you, that’s great, but when it doesn’t, you need a brain and some experience.

My day wouldn’t be complete without revisiting my small MySQL Rant. While it remains true that databases are often employed doing labor better done with flat files or even in-memory tables, the fact is that all the cool kids have MySQL hats and we wouldn’t want them dissing us any more than they already would, so I’ll grit my teeth and use MySQL for this exposition. It is a trial and a tribulation to do so, and I expect a pat on the back accompanied by soothing words from you to show your appreciation of my pain.

I’m waiting.

Ok, fine, we’ll go ahead anyway. Having properly finagled our path, it’s time to create a database for our “try_rails” project.

mysqladmin -u root -p create try_rails_development

That asks for a password; if you’ve done nothing but follow the steps I outlined here, just press enter. If instead you are already wearing your MySQL tee-shirt, hat, and belt-buckle, you probably changed your MySQL root password and know what to type all by yourself. So don’t ask me. But.. if you were the “I know what I’m doing” type, be aware that Rails needs to know your password, so you’ll need to edit try_rails/config/database.yml and in doing so, you might understand why we created try_rails_development. Everyone else should just move along quietly – nothing more to see here, folks.

Some magic incantations:

cd try_rails
ruby script/generate migration accounts

I’m not entirely clear yet on what that really does. I’ll take it on faith as a necessary step for now.

vi db/migrate/001_accounts.rb

Yeah, you have to use vi. Oh, ok, you don’t. Use whatever you want and stop moaning. Edit the file and make it look like this:

Class Accounts < ActiveRecord::Migration
   def self.up
     create_table :puters do |table|
      table.column :name, :string
      table.column :proc, :string
      table.column :cost, :float
    end
   end

   def self.down
    drop_table :puters
   end
end

Now do this:

ruby script/generate scaffold puter expenses
cd try_rails; ruby script/server
(If you had left the server running, Ctrl-C will stop it)

More magic words. Ahh, the power of blind faith. The only part of that I understand is the editing.

Oh, yes, you can find explanations of the inner machinations of these things on the web, and "script/generate" is of course just a Ruby program that you could follow and ultimately comprehend. My knowledge of Ruby is insufficient for that at the moment, so I'll just follow the recipes.

Amazingly enough, you now have a working application. Point your browser at http://localhost:3000/expenses and there it is. It's simple, and not all that glamorous, but it does the things it needs to do.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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You may have also seen a dog or two being dragged across a floor when they didn’t want to go somewhere; that’s pretty much the image you should have of me and Ruby on Rails.

The July 2006 issue of Linux Journal has been kicking around the edges of my desk for a few days. Part of the reason I had been pushing it aside is that the cover theme is Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. “Fahh, fahh, fahh”, I grumbled to myself as I once again moved this issue somewhere where it couldn’t stare at me with that accusatory “you haven’t even OPENED me” look.

Last night, sometime after we had eaten dinner and before settling on the porch with a Corona, I picked up the magazine and started thumbing through it. I read the letters, perused “diff -u”, skipped “At the Forge” and “Cooking with Linux”, and then thumbed to Reuven Lerner’s “Introduction to Ruby”. I probably made a face as I started reading, but then..

Hey, this isn’t so bad. Mac OS X 10.4 has ruby and irb (interactive ruby) installed by default, so I was able to just type “irb” and follow along with the examples. Hmm.. I’m starting to like this “ruby” thing. Suddenly I don’t feel like I’m being dragged across the floor trying to dig my nails into linoleum. No, this dog likes Ruby! Give me more!

So what the heck: let’s go for the Rails! I found Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger, which is an excellent guide to getting this all installed. One minor glitch: I had some trouble with Ruby Gems. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what finally got it working, but ultimately it started behaving. I tried installing it manually, but couldn’t get by a “No such file to load — rubygems (LoadError)”. The Hivelogic docs mention that and say it’s a PATH problem, but that wasn’t the case for me. I did some web searching and found that Ruby can be quite confused as to what the real problem is when it gives this error, but I still couldn’t nail it down. Because I was multitasking while investigating this, I had gone ahead and installed MySQL; strangely it seems that Gems started working after that.. I can’t imagine why.

Anyway, the final step was to have Rails create a skeleton app. I did “rails try_rails; cd try_rails; ruby script/server” and then pointed Firefox at http://localhost:3000 – and there it was, Ruby on Rails up and running and ready for me to use.

Well, it’s ready. I’m not. I have quite a bit more reading and futzing about to do before I can do anything useful or fun. But at least it’s all installed, and I have a reason to read more of this month’s Linux Journal.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com