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Tag Archives: sinatra

In defense of dynamic languages

03 May

There are a good many truths and there are a better set of likelihoods. Given the current state of dynamic languages today they are less performance than static and functional languages, however, it is also true that dynamic languages are more productive than static and functional languages. (I am not talking about savants)

Don’t optimize your code at the first stage. First make it right, then (if necessary) make it fast (while keeping it right). –erlang programming rules

It is likely that regardless of the size of your project, the size or makeup of your team, or the breakthrough that you think the project represents… that your project is going to have average results at best. The Google’s, FaceBooks and Twitters of the world are extreme edge cases. As proof, look at the iPhone app store. There are over 600,000 apps and only a very small fraction of those apps have the following that Angry Birds does.

So before you go off in a corner reinventing the wheel in your favorite language consider this. WHat is going to be your return on investment? I cannot blame you for learning a new language or tool that would enhance your marketability or even just for hobby sake. But if your intent is to make some money and maybe a little independence they you really need to consider your ROI. And if you’re making money then rewriting your killer app in whatever killer fast programming language is available (and popular) will make make plenty of sense.

This is why I’m hot on python and python’s django, tornadoweb, flask; perl and perl’s mojolicious; ruby and ruby’s sinatra and rails; redis, sqlite, zeromq.

PS: While I’m not a fan of erlang, partly because of what it represents, I really like it’s Programming Rules and Conventions(PRC). By comparison python’s PEP-8 is amateurish. The PRC starts off with ideas like the one quoted above and giving you ideas on how best to approach the problem. This is like python’s PEP-20 but again it’s like signing your name with a crayon instead of a fountain pen.

 
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Posted by on 2012/05/03 in architecture, ProgLang

 

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Your Next Web Application Framework?

12 Apr

Suppose you are the person who has to make the decision as to what language and framework your startup is going to use to deploy it’s application.  What would you choose? There are so many interesting and qualified frameworks that are already powering a good portion of the internet.

(You don’t have to know the language and framework but enough to argue what makes it idea.)

What would it be?

For example: I read an article several years ago that strongly recommended Erlang. At the time it was a great idea. The author suggested that using Erlang would attract smart people and keep the actual number of respondents to something manageable. Since then I implemented several applications that in hindsight: (a) impossible to attract new talent. (b) the more time that passes the more fragile the app gets because my detail recollection is fading (c) and it lacks common tools that would make allow generalized apps to give access to “operators” instead of programmers.

Other examples include: perl, ruby, python… mojolicious, rails and sinatra, flask, tornadoweb, and django.

I have my ideas… what are yours?

 
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Posted by on 2012/04/12 in architecture, future, web

 

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What is so interesting about the Flask microframework?

22 Mar

I get that Flask has a lot of the same design patterns that Ruby’s Sinatra has. I suppose if one used a metadata approach to application construction/deployment that you might be able to basically interchange between them.

I did a search hoping to find out the differences between Flask and Tornado. I was rewarded with a page from the the Flask development doc. The contributor was suggesting that one might link or cascade Flask with either Tornado, Gevent, Gunicorn or some other proxy setup.

While mentioning Tornado the contributor says…

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. Integrating this service with Flask is a trivial task:

In the deployment section of the doc Flask makes is clear that the built-in webserver is strictly for development. The reasons are probably very similar to Rails’ webrick but in the case of Flask there are no explanations. Nor is there a recommendation just a list of servers.

I recently deployed a Tornado-ZeroMQ bridge in order to increase the transaction throughput. Sitting in front of the Tornado instance is a traditional webserver like apache, lighttpd, nginx. These webservers are serving static content because that is what they do best and the dynamic requests are passed thru. But why would I deploy lighttpd->tornadoweb->flask? There is plenty of room for improvement here but someone transitioning from sinatra to/from flask could be rewarded.

hello world from their respective websites:
(Flask)

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def hello():
  return "Hello World!"

if __name__ == "__main__":
 app.run()

(Sinatra)

require 'sinatra' 
get '/hi' do 
  "Hello World!" 
end
 
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Posted by on 2012/03/22 in Tools, web

 

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My Ruby Installation

21 Jan

[update 2012-01-22] A new project is underway. ‘crud-fest-rb’ it’s part of a new story I’m writing. I just tried to launch a new rails project and I was blocked because I was missing some basic gems. They are now in the list below. The names are: jquery-rails, coffee-rails, sass-rails, uglifier. My empty RubyMine/rails-3.2 project is now running. The CRUD comes next.

[update 2012-01-21] I just published this article a few hours ago and I realized that I forgot some stuff. I forgot to mention that I need Twitter’s Bootstrap project here too. So when I start working on my first project I’ll need to import Bootstrap. I might have missed a few more things… I have been following python and many of the python libs longer than ruby so that makes sense. If you have any recommendations send them on. PS: TextMate is getting an update soon but I think I’m going to install and use RubyMine from jetbrains.com. It’s like PyCharm, also from jetbrains.com but for Ruby and supports Rails. (hopefully Rails 3.2). Like PyCharm, RubyMine support RVM out of the box. Nothing special required.

I’m not a great fan of Ruby. I was in the beginning when I was first introduced to Spring. And it was not so much Ruby as it was Rails. The fact that it did all the CRUD one could want was a big deal. Now it’s not that uncommon. Django offers CRUD for python app developers and Grails offers CRUD for java developers.

Reddit recently linked to a visual comparing python, ruby and php. There were some interesting observations about the number of programmers and projects in each vertical. That combined with my new love for RVM has given Ruby a new lease on life in my toolkit. (I have also worked on professional Ruby projects but without RVM they were no fun).

RVM is a big deal. Not unlike virtualenv for python, RVM allows the programmer to install and configure his/her development environment in userspace. This means that many of the fears I had about creating my dev environment on my local hardware and version collision and dependency mismatch means that all I really need to do is create a separate user directory on my laptop for each project. This way everything is nicely partitioned and what I can focus on is backups rather than the crazy live of remote virtual servers for development. Of which there is still some value for demonstrations and client access.

So let’s setup a basic RVM install so that we can start our next project. Some of the installation is going to overlap with the python installation (here). You can skip all of the userspace installation but the sudo installation is all you’ll need. Keep in mind that this installation was all about a virtual server at RackSpace. If you are installing on a Mac or Windows machine your install will be different.

Install the default ruby. I originally thought that I’d need to install at least one Ruby installation in the core OS but it turned out to be unnecessary. RVM will install any version of ruby for you. Once RVM is installed you can issue the command (rvm list known) and you’ll get a list of the known rubies available. In fact I had to remove this package and start again because of some side effects down the road.

apt-get install ruby1.9.1

Install RVM

bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)

startup RVM… you can logoff and back in or you can look at the last line of your ‘.profile’ and execute the source command.

source "/home/rbucker/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

NOTE: I did some looking at the .rvm directory and I saw some things that did not make sense.  It seems that many of the modules and ruby artifacts were being installed in a ruby folder labeled 1.9.1 presumably that was a ruby version. I have restarted the install process several times now and it appears that RVM is installing my version of ruby 1.9.3-p0 as a set of patches over version 1.9.1 which explains the folder structure.

install a recent Ruby version

rvm install 1.9.3-p0

Make this version current (you will have to run this command every time you login)

rvm use 1.9.3-p0

If you want to make this version of ruby the default version run this command (note the default command will insure this version of ruby os ready each time you login)

rvm use 1.9.3-p0 --default

which rubies are installed and which is current

ruby list

install some gems in userspace. Note that rvm is taking over the gem install. Lucky for me Rails 3.2 was released a few days ago and now it’s installing. I’ve elected to install Sinatra too. That’s because it’s a useful micro framework when rails is just too much.

gem install rails
gem install jquery-rails
gem install coffee-rails
gem install sass-rails
gwm install uglifier
gem install sinatra
gem install redis
gem install mongodb
gem install pg
gem install mustache
gem install fastercsv 
gem install iso8583
gem install sqlite3
gem install ruote 
gem install json
gem install sxp
gem install sexp
gem install zmq
gem install beanstalk-client
gem install rmre
gem install haml
gem install db-charmer
gem install mail
gem install activemerchant
...
gem update money rack rake sourcify sprockets

**there were some initial difficulties installing the ‘pg’ gem. It started off as a problem because the install would not complete. I kinda realized that I was missing the postgres dev files so I installed that core package as the root user. When I installed the gem on my OSX machine it installed nicely. I’m not certain I know why or how the postgres client was installed on my OSX machine but it seems to have included enough code to compile the gem. MacPort was not installed on either machine or maybe it was corrupted because it’s not functioning and I’d swear that it was installed once before.

**one other thing that is concerning me is the version number of the ZMQ gem. If the version number maps to the version of the main lib then they are mountains apart and that’s something I cannot afford. It’s one of the reasons that I’m going down the path of RVM and native gem management. Some interesting notes; the version of the GEM is 2.0.7 and when you run ZMQ.version() from the IRB you get different results so it must be checking the binary libs.

On my OSX

rbucker@rmac[usr]$ irb
1.9.3-p0 :001 > require 'zmq'
 => true
1.9.3-p0 :002 > ZMQ.version()
 => [2, 1, 10]

On my Ubuntu

rbucker@soldev:~$ irb
1.9.3-p0 :001 > require 'zmq'
 => true
1.9.3-p0 :002 > ZMQ.version()
 => [2, 1, 11]

install gems for building gems. I do not know anything about them except that I hope that they work.  I’ve installed all three because they should not collide. There is a 4th and 5th option.  There are some devs that have github general templates that they use. You can always roll your own in a similar way. Personally I’m interested in these 3 projects because it might mean less editing for me.

gem install jeweler
gem install hoe
gem install echoe

At this point I’d create my bare bones project, install bootstrap just like the python version, and then start hacking my project.

Reference material: I really like pragprog.com. They seem to have the most current docs. Their PDF and epub ebooks are great and they keep me updated. (Rails 3.2 was just released and their eBook was also updated just a few days later; granted not much was supposed to have changed, but still).

In the coming week I’ll be writing an article on the CRUD-fest in django and rails as I start building my credit card association test harness. Stay tuned as this page will be updated as I add gems to my basic installation.

 
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Posted by on 2012/01/21 in Tools, web

 

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