Web Services With Sinatra.

SOA with Merb?.

Throw in a little Happy Mapper and you sort of have the equivalent of Restlet/Jersey and Castor/Jibx in the Java world. Enterprise indeed.

When trying to install the zeep messaging gem recently, sure enough I struggled a bit with getting the syntax correct.

Anyway, without further ado, here is what worked:
config.gem "zeep-messaging", :lib => "zeep/messaging", :version => "0.1.5"

Kinda nice sending SMS messages from the console, I have to admit.

Apache will log to its own log files, as well as handle log rotation, so nothing much to write about there. However, as a good practice, you’ll likely want to rotate your Radiant logs. And for that, you’ll want logrotate.

Logrotate gets its configuration information from /etc/logrotate.conf, so one just needs to open it up and tell it to look at the Radiant logs and rotate them like so:

# Rotate Rails application logs
/path/to/radiant/shared/log/*.log {
daily
missingok
rotate 7
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
copytruncate
}

This will rotate 7 days worth of logs, compress older logs and start a new log file. And it will do it daily. Simple.

Monitoring is a bit more involved, but God makes it fairly easy, and its all in Ruby. According to this helpful site mod_rails monitors its own processes, which leaves us to Monitor Apache, MySQL and any other processes running around. The God site has very good documentation, so I suggest you head over there if you want detailed descriptions of everything it can do. For the sake of this post, I'll just lead folks to simple Apache and MySQL configurations.

After installing God sudo gem install god --no-ri --no-rdoc, setup a conf.god somewhere sensible and take a look at the posts below, as it probably doesn't make sense for me to reiterate what others have already admirably accomplished:
Monitoring MySQL and setting up notifications.
Monitoring Apache.

Now I just need to figure out what will monitor God.

The shortcut in question is a fork of the Sprinkle gem by Mitchell Hashimoto. Check out his screencast for the details and read the comments as well. I just had to change the Phusion Passenger versions in the scripts, modify the scripts to install MySQL and Radiant (gem install radiant) and I was good to go.

If you’ve never setup a Slice before, I don’t usually recommend using ready-made scripts, as it’s good to go through the steps – particularly as things do tend to break. I had problems installing the MySQL gem from Capistrano for some reason I didn’t bother to dwell on for too long. Otherwise, I found the Sprinkle gem to be very helpful.

Now onto monitoring with God, some logrotate and the other usual suspects.

The plugin will read the method values corresponding to the symbols above when posting to MailChimp.

As an aside, the kind folks at MailChimp recently added acts_as_chimp to
their plugin page.

pastie

To get started using the API, use commands like the following:


t = Braintree.find(:all, :params => {:username => 'btdemo', :password => 'btdemo123', :last_name => 'Lin'})



t.each do |transaction|
transaction.gimme_my_money
end


Pretty straightforward stuff if you want to incorporate this into your Rails app, either for integration test verification or some admin pages.

Braintree pastie

If you want to know more about ActiveMerchant, check out the Peepcode PDF. Should prove helpful.

“Including the ability to purchase”. Hilarious. Nobodies perfect I guess.

The quick and dirty is to roll your own and add it to the model in question, and even this can probably be improved:
TAG_COUNT_SQL = "SELECT tags.id, tags.name, COUNT(*) AS count FROM tags INNER JOIN taggings ON tags.id = taggings.tag_id INNER JOIN posts ON posts.id = taggings.taggable_id WHERE ((posts.id = ?) AND taggings.taggable_type = 'Post') GROUP BY tags.id, tags.name HAVING COUNT(*) > 0 "

I’ve been running into enough plugin issues recently, that I’m definitely moving much closer to the always roll your own ideology as I use Rails more frequently…but, it does depend upon the use case the plugin is trying to solve. Some plugins are eminently malleable (as opposed to monkey patchable, and there is a difference), and thats a great feature.

A plugin that beats the monkey metaphors to death:
script/plugin install git://github.com/matthewjcarlson/acts_as_chimp .

Let me know if it does or doesn’t work. It’s less a library then an implementation of a use case I’ve encountered a few times recently. As such, while plugins are falling out of favor a bit, I felt like a plugin made sense for what I’m doing here. If you’d prefer a gem or more detailed MailChimp interaction, there’s an excellent MailChimp gem available here or you can drop me a comment as well.