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Rails

Where Will Ruby Go Now? Talking with Tenderlove at RailsConf

Last week at RailsConf in Kansas City, Terence Lee and Richard Schneeman of Heroku’s Ruby Task Force sat down with the legendary Aaron Patterson (AKA tenderlove).

Aaron has been working hard to make Ruby three times faster — a goal that Matz called Ruby 3×3. Along the way, Aaron has discovered that Ruby may face a hard decision. On one side, Ruby can continue to be the productive, general-purpose scripting language that it looks like today. But the other side of Ruby is that it’s used to run long-running processes in Rails applications, pushing it to be more performant, strongly-typed, …

Real-Time Rails: Implementing WebSockets in Rails 5 with Action Cable

It's been one year since Action Cable debuted at RailsConf 2015, and Sophie DeBenedetto is here to answer the question in the minds of many developers: what is it really like to implement "the highlight of Rails 5"? Sophie is a web developer and an instructor at the Flatiron School. Her first love is Ruby on Rails, although she has developed projects with and written about Rails, Ember and Phoenix.

Recent years have seen the rise of "the real-time web." Web apps we use every day rely on real-time features—the sort of features that let you see new posts magically …

Container-Ready Rails 5

Rails 5 will be the easiest release ever to get running on Heroku. You can get it going in just five lines:

$ rails new myapp -d postgresql
$ cd myapp
$ git init . ; git add . ; git commit -m first
$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master

These five lines (and a view or two) are all you need to get a Rails 5 app working on Heroku — there are no special gems you need to install, or flags you must toggle. Let's take a peek under the hood, and explore the interfaces baked …

Speeding Up Sprockets for Faster Asset Pipelines

The asset pipeline is the slowest part of deploying a Rails app. How slow? On average, it’s over 20x slower than installing dependencies via $ bundle install. Why so slow? In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons the asset pipeline is slow and how we were able to get a 12x performance improvement on some apps with Sprockets version 3.3+.

The Rails asset pipeline uses the sprockets library to take your raw assets such as javascript or Sass files and pre-build minified, compressed assets that are ready to be served by a …

Upgrading to Rails 5 Beta – The Hard Way

Rails 5 has been brewing for more than a year. To take advantage of new features, and stay on the supported path, you'll need to upgrade. In this post, we'll look at the upgrade process for a production Rails app, codetriage.com. The codebase is open source so you can follow along. Special thanks to Prathamesh for his help with this blog post.

How Stable is the Beta?

In Rails a beta means the API is not yet stable, and features will come and go. A Release Candidate (RC) means no new features; the API is considered stable, and …

How We Migrated to Active Record 4

If your application is successful, there may come a time where you’re on an unsupported version of a dependency. In the case of the Heroku Platform API, this dependency was a very old version of Active Record from many years ago. Due to the complexity involved in the upgrade, this core piece of infrastructure had been pegged at version 2.3.18, which was released in March 2013. We're happy to announce that we've overcome the challenge and are now running Active Record 4.2.4, the latest version, in production. In this post, we'll describe the technical challenges we faced in the …

We Patched Ruby On Rails for a 10% Performance Bump

In a recent patch we improved Rails response time by >10%, our largest improvement to date. I’m going to show you how I did it, and introduce you to the tools I used, because.. who doesn’t want fast apps?

In addition to a speed increase, we see a 29% decrease in allocated objects. If you haven’t already, you can read or watch more about how temporary allocated objects affect total memory use. Decreasing memory pressure on an app may allow it to be run on a smaller dyno type, or spawn more worker processes to handle more throughput. …

Debugging Super Methods with Ruby 2.2

Debugging a large codebase is hard. Ruby makes debugging easier by exposing method metadata and caller stack inside Ruby's own process. Recently in Ruby 2.2.0 this meta inspection got another useful feature by exposing super method metadata. In this post we will look at how this information can be used to debug and why it needed to be added.

One of the first talks I ever wrote was "Dissecting Ruby With Ruby" all about inspecting and debugging Ruby processes using nothing but Ruby code. If you've never heard of the Method method it's worth a watch.

In short, Ruby …

Benchmarking Rack Middleware and Improved Speed

Performance is important, and if we can’t measure something, we can’t make it fast. Recently, I’ve had my eye on the ActionDispatch::Static middleware in Rails. This middleware gets put at the front of your stack when you set config.serve_static_assets = true in your Rails app. This middleware has to compare every request that comes in to see if it should render a file from the disk or return the request further up the stack. This post is how I was able to benchmark the middleware and give it a crazy speed boost.

How ActionDispatch::Static Works

Right now to serve static …

Helios – open source framework for mobile

Heroku has a strong tradition with open source projects. Engineers have dedicated countless hours to the projects that developers count on every day. Open Source Software is in our DNA.

Speaking personally, I’m passionate about building tools like AFNetworking and cupertino, in order to help developers build insanely great experiences for mobile devices. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce something new I’ve been working on:

Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential back-end services for iOS apps. This includes data synchronization, push notifications, in-app purchases, and passbook integration. It allows developers to get a client-server app up-and-running …

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