We’re using Facebooker for our Rails based Facebook apps. However, we ran into a problem after migrating our session store to the MemCacheStore. Every request was producing the following stacktrace:

No, it’s not April 1st, and as far as I know, hell hasn’t frozen over either. The Merb and Rails teams have in fact announced that they will be joining forces. The end result will eventually be released as Rails 3.

For some reason I derive immense gratification from hacking cheap commodity consumer devices and making them do much more than they were originally designed to. Not that I can’t claim all that much credit (as I generally just apply readily available hacks that others have figured out), but still…

Amazon Web Services

Today, Amazon removed the beta label from their EC2 service, along with a bunch of related announcements. This is great news!

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Rails 2.1 natively supports incoming JSON requests. Unfortunately, it still struggles with JSON data containing non-ASCII characters.

I realized that it’s been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing… ;)

I’ve been meaning to set up a network monitoring tool at work for a while. We have a couple of different applications using various technologies (currently mainly Ruby on Rails and PHP), running on various VPS servers. While we are using Monit to keep an eye on our Rails apps and restart them if necessary, as well as a couple of custom webpages to track vital and growth stats of our apps, we currently don’t use any monitoring or (perhaps more importantly) alerting tools beyond that. After one of our PHP / MySQL apps stopped responding (due to the fact that we ran out of disk space, as we later discovered), I figured it was about time to put some more sophisticated network monitoring in place.

According to this blog post and several mentions on Twitter, Phusion announced today’s release of Passenger (aka mod_rails) 2.0 at RailsConf. Apparently, Passenger 2.0 will be Rack compliant and thus support not only Rails, but any Rack compatible web framework, including Merb and Sinatra. Interestingly, Passenger will not even be limited to Ruby any more and extend their support to WSGI, the Python web adapter framework that inspired Rack in the first place. For example, this will allow Passenger 2.0 to run the popular Django web framework. In light of these changes, Passenger will drop the name mod_rails.

Earlier this week, we tried to figure out the cleanest and easiest way to get our Rails app to accept incoming JSON requests. Up until recently, developers were able to use various Rails plugins for this purpose, such as the json_request plugin.