The Devver Blog

We are working hard to quickly expand our compatibility on Ruby projects. With that goal driving us, we are happy to announce support for Postgres and SQLite databases. With the addition of these database options, along with our existing support for MySQL, Devver now supports all of the most popular databases commonly used with Ruby. These three databases are the default databases tested against ActiveRecord and we expect will cover the majority of the Ruby community.

To begin working with Postgres or SQLite on Devver all you need to do is have a database.yml with the test environment set to the adapter of your choice. If we don't support your favorite database, you can still request a beta invite and let us know which database you want us to support. If we just added support for your database, perhaps we can speed up your project on Devver, so request a beta invite.

From the beginning of Devver, we decided we wanted to work with some new technologies and we wanted to be able to scale easily. After looking at options AWS seemed to have many technologies that could help us build and scale a system like Devver. One of these technologies was SimpleDB. One of the other new things we decided to try was DataMapper (DM) rather than the more familiar ActiveRecord. This eventually let me to work on my own SimpleDB DataMapper adapter.

Searching for ways to work with SDB using Ruby, we found a SimpleDB DM adapter by Jeremy Boles. It worked well initially but as our needs grew (and to make it compatible with the current version of DM) it became necessary to add and update the features of the adapter. These changes lived hidden in our project's code for awhile, for no other reason than we were too lazy to really commit it all back on GitHub. Recently though there has been a renewed interest about working with on SimpleDB with Ruby. I started pushing the code updates on GitHub, then I got a couple requests and suggestions here and there to improve the adapter. One of these suggestions cam from Ara Howard, who is doing impressive work of his own on Ruby and AWS, specifically SimpleDB. His suggestion on moving from the aws_sdb gem to right_aws, which along with other changes improved performance significantly (1.6x on write, up to 36x on reading large queries over the default limit of 100 objects). Besides performance improvements, we have recently added limit and sorting support to the adapter.

As I added features, testing the adapter also became slow, (over a minute a run) because the functional tests actually connect to and use SimpleDB. Since Devver is all about speeding up Ruby tests, I decided to get the tests running on Devver. It was actually very easy and sped up the test suite from 1 minute and 8 seconds down to 28 seconds. You can check out how much Devver speeds up the results yourself.

We are currently using the SimpleDB adapter to power our Devver.net website as well as the Devver backend service. It has been working well for us, but we know that it doesn't cover everyone's needs. Next time you are creating a simple project, give SimpleDB a look, we would love feedback about the DM adapter, and it would be great to get some other people contributing to the project. If anyone does fork my SDB Adapter Github repo, feel free to send me pull requests. Also, let me know if you want to try using Devver as you hack on the adapter, it can really speed up testing, and I would be happy to give out a free account.

Lastly, at a recent Boulder Ruby users group meet up, the group did a code review for the adapter. It went well and I should finish cleaning up the code and get the improvements suggested by the group committed to GitHub soon.

Update: The refactorings suggested at the code review are now live on GitHub.

We recently redid our website. The new site included a new design and much more content explaining what we do. We wanted a quick way to check over everything and make sure we didn't miss any spelling errors or typos. First I started looking for a web service that could scan the site for spelling errors. I found spellr.us, which is nice but would only catch errors once they were live. It also can't scan all of the pages which require being logged in.

I was pairing with Avdi who thought we should just run Aspell, which worked out great. We were originally trying to just create a simple Emacs macro to go through all our HTML files and check them but in the end created simple Rake tasks, which makes it really easy to integrate spellcheck into CI. After Avdi figured out the commands we needed to use on each file to get the information we needed from Aspell, it was easy to just wrap the command using Rake's FileList. To keep everyone on the same setup, we created a local dictionary of words to ignore or accept and keep that checked into source control as well.

The final solution grabs all the files you want to spell check, then runs them through Aspell with HTML filtering. We have two tasks: one that runs in interactive mode the the user can fix mistakes and one mode for CI that just fails if it finds any errors.