If you’ve worked with MongoMapper for a while, you’ve probably noticed that in complex apps, there are horrific memory leaks in development that magically disappear in production mode. While this is all well and good, and it’s rather handy that things Just Work in production, don’t you wish you didn’t have to restart your app [...]
will_paginate is the de facto Rails paging plugin, and with good reason – it’s solid, fast, and reliable. Everyone I know uses it, but a lot of people don’t use it to its full power. I recently discovered some very cool functionality it includes – the WillPaginate::Collection class can be used as a custom paginator [...]
Introduction MongoDB 1.6 was released today, and it includes, among other things it includes support for the incredible sexy replica sets feature – basically master/slave replication on crack with automatic failover and the like. I’m setting it up, and figured I’d document the pieces as I walk through them. My test deploy is going to [...]
I was recently in need of a click mapping solution, and didn’t like most of the solutions I came across. They had huge dependency chains and were generally unwieldy, or they didn’t work that well, or they were external services that I had to pay for…until I ran across heatmapthing. Now we’re talking. Client-side rendering [...]
I’ve just released my first Android app, called FlexAuth. It’s mostly an excuse to learn Android development, but it does something useful, too – it serves as a souped-up mobile authenticator for Blizzard’s Battle.net login infrastructure. If you’d like the gory details, there’s a specification floating around on the internet that’ll help you understand the [...]
Since my initial experiments with GridFS and nginx-gridfs, I discovered a rather downer of a dealbreaker: compiling Passenger and nginx-gridfs into the same nginx binary makes nginx very unhappy. It hard-freezes (as in, blocks forever) when you request a GridFS file with Passenger enabled. Oops. So, I sat down and fixed gridfs-fuse. You can grab [...]
GridFS is a nifty little feature in MongoDB that allows you to store files of all shapes and sizes in Mongo itself, getting the benefits of Mongo’s sharding and replication. However, since they’re in a database, and not on the filesystem directly, how do we serve them? There are lots of benchmarks and numbers under [...]
I’ve started playing with MongoMapper, and it’s quite excellent, but it does suffer very much from being young. There are lots of pieces missing that veterans of ActiveRecord will take for granted. I’ve been working around or patching them, for the most part, but I felt that my solution to `:counter_cache` deserved a post. In [...]
I’ve started using action caching more aggressively, to handle a large volume of not-signed-in search traffic. It composes a significant chunk of my site’s total traffic, but there’s no good reason to be recomputing full pages for all those long-tail hits. So, the obvious thing is to just implement a quick action cache. This all [...]
Rails does an awful lot to optimize page generation, but there are a number of hacks, tweaks, and usage patterns you should be using to get the most out of your app. Configuration tweaks There’s a lot of the Rails stack that’s written in Ruby, which is great – it’s portable, it’s flexible, it works [...]
