Ruby on Rails
Hong Kong

3rd
2010
Jun

HKRor Meetup in May 2010 - Writeup

The Meetup in May took part weeks ago. we had a really nice Chaozhou dinner afterward. Thanks William (GearBox Software) for offering the office (and AWESOME COFFEE!) for the meetup.

Here is a quick wrap up of stuff discussed:

Matthew had gone through his chinese “tutorial” Ruby application pootonghua which utilized many plugins and tools:

  • Sinatra - gem that allows simple and quick web service
  • Heroku - hosting that supports easy deployment. as simple as installing a gem and push changes to git repository.
  • stored data in JSON format for a small set of data. may consider a key-value db if the size of data growing

Some random issues were raised during the meetup:

  • After a while, your Sinatra file may bloat very fast, because you have to define at least one block for one url pattern. It was suggested to refactor regularly and even split them into different folder and namespace.
  • Have to be aware of the caching done by Heroku. Although it is a nice feature to be provided by default, sometimes you may not get the behavior you were expecting.
  • Pricing of Heroku is kind of confusing, especially the memory and worker units(dynos) calculation. You may better start with the lowest specification first and then do some testing benchmarking before you upgrade to a higher package.
  • String#end_with does not work on Heroku environment, *perhaps* the ruby version is not the latest 1.8.7. btw, you can change the Heroku ruby version by heroku stack.
  • MongoDB and Cabinet-db looks interesting to most of us. It was encouraged to have a look and try it out.

Looking forward to June 2010 Hong Kong Ruby Meetup ~