upstream agile - software

New Rails Plugin: social feed

This is our latest and also largest plugin for ruby on rails so far. After the installation it adds a social feed as seen in the picture to your rails application. The sources have been extracted from autoki which has had a social feed for a couple of months now, so rest assured we have put some thoughts into it over time.

Features so far: As a user I can decide what kinds of events I want to see on my social feed and also wether I want to be sent an email when an event occurs. I can also decide wether others will receive a notification on their social feed concerning my own actions.

The plugin includes model extensions for the user, a controller and views for viewing the feed and editing settings as well as a generator to easily create new event types so, getting started only takes a couple of minutes. For more info check out the README or get the sources from github.

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Rails reporting: dead simple reports now supports excel directly

dead simple reports is a Ruby on Rails plugin that allows you to create reports from your application data within minutes. As of now it can not only generate HTML tables and CSV files but also M$ Excel spreadsheets. This is possible through the use of the spreadsheet-excel gem. You can grab a copy from the git repository or just download it from there.

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upstream goes open source: dead simple reports

Na endlich. Nach all den Jahren des nur-Geldverdienens und Open Source-Ausnutzens haben wir es geschafft, ein paar erste Zeilen Code in die Freiheit zu entlassen: dead simple reports, ein Rails-Plugin, das Reports generieren kann. Mehr dazu im neuen Bereich Open Source

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MySql Lost Connection Error in großen Rails Anwendungen

Seit kurzen beunruhigt uns die folgende Fehlermeldung: Mysql::Error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query. Sie tritt immer wieder sporadisch ohne erkennbare Ursache auf. Heute Nacht bin ich eher durch Zufall auf eine Erklärung und idealerweise auch auf eine Lösung des Problems gestoßen.

Kurz zusammengefasst: ActiveRecord verwendet pro Model eine Datenbankverbindung. Wenn die Datenbank unter Last steht, kann es passieren, dass die Verbindung nicht schnell genug bereitgestellt wird und der Lost-Connection-Fehler auftritt.

Über das setzen von ActiveRecord::Base.verification_timeout=14400 oder einen Wert niedriger als die MySql Server interactive_timeout -Einstellung in der environment.rb lässt sich der Timeout heraufsetzen. Um dem Problem nachhaltig zu begegnen, hat Tyler Kovacs von zvents das Pluginmysql_retry_lost_connection geschrieben, das versucht, die Verbindung erneut herzustellen, wenn es einen Timeout gab.

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Rails Fragment Caching - Testing and time based expiry

in the last days i started implementing caching for autoki.com. my first stop was this excellent rails caching tutorial over at railsenvy.com.

basically, rails offers 3 ways of caching page content:

• page caching: an entire page gets stored on the hard disk and can then be served by apache instead of rails - very fast but almost useless for us, as every page has some dynamic element in this. we still consider it for some ajax calls.
• action caching: also caches the entire page, but it’s still served by rails, which means before_filters for stuff like authnetication still work - still not for us, see above
• fragment caching: as the name implies caches fragments of a page - yay, sounds good

fragment caching

the basics are really easy. first, you simply surround the parts of the page that you want to cache with a <% cache ' … <% end %>. this writes the fragment to a file in /tmp/caches and from now on, rails serves this part of the page from the cache.

this alone doesn’t get you any performance improvements yet, because your controller is still loading all the data from the database before rendering the view. to avoid this, you wrap your data loading code into unless read_fragment 'name' ... end blocks - now you page should be running lightning fast already.

the third problem to tackle is to clean the cache at the right time. this can either be done in the controllers by calling expire_fragment 'name' or by using so called sweepers. they are basically observe your models and clean the right fragments on events like after_create - so when you add a new user to the system, you can clean the list of users from the cache.
weiterlesen…

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