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I’ve been an independent web developer for over a month now, and I am enjoying every moment of it! If the first step in the liberation of programmers is getting Java- or .NET-free, the second step must be to get employer-free. Of course, being an employee has many benefits and doesn’t hold much risk (especially not if you live in one of these countries where it is practically impossible to fire people, such as Sweden or France), and being independent doesn’t mean - at least not yet for me - that you don’t have to do boring or tedious work.

But it does mean that any time during work hours where I am not doing work for a customer is my own time, and on my own time I get to decide what to work on. I am building a product during these free hours, and while I’d like to hold the details a bit longer (”don’t tell - show!” someone smart has said), I can say that it is a Ruby on Rails application allowing manipulation of PDF documents. Ruby has some decent PDF libraries, and Prawn holds a great potential, but none of these allow me to manipulate existing PDF documents.

The Java library iText is capable of doing so, and so is the .NET port iTextSharp, but would I really have to build some kind of web service in one of these forsaken frameworks? I was complaining about it to a friend, and promptly asked me: Why don’t you build it in JRuby? The more I thought about it, the more this seemed to be the perfect excuse for trying out JRuby, and so I set out to build my first ever JRuby on Rails application. It also helped that I got a free OpenSolaris/Glassfish VPS from Sun and Layered Technologies.

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“is bemused/awed by how fast svn became a legacy technology in ruby community/developers” Dr. Nic recently said on Twitter. It is true. Greatly aided by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s screencast on git, I myself is starting to feel comfortable enough with git to start abandoning subversion altogether.

Github is great, but there is really no reason to pay for private git repositories unless you need the added functionality. I have a Dreamhost account that I am happy with, so why not use that for my private git repos? It is easy to do through SSH, now that git is installed on all Dreamhost servers, but it is not that, so I thought I’d better document it here for my own future reference.

(This stuff is tested on Mac OSX, and should work fine for *nix users. Windows users will have to do some workarounds, but can use this as a reference point.)

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© 2008 Jacob Lauemøller

We had meeting in Copenhagen Ruby Brigade the other night with a theme of “Present something interesting from this year’s RailsConf Europe”. Three had found the time to prepare a presentation, and I was one of them. I gave a summary of the Juggernaut presentation, not only because it was interesting and entertaining (the original presentation, not my summary!), but because it really made me feel like start coding an application using Juggernaut right away. Juggernaut is a small server and a Rails plugin that allows the web server to push information in real time to clients using an open Flash socket. The syntax for pushing data (typically javascript or JSON) to client is very similar to RJS, e.g.:

render :juggernaut do |page|
    page.insert_html :top, 'chat_data', "#{h(params[:chat])}"
  end

When a client wants to broadcast to other clients, it simply fires an ordinary AJAX request to a controller, which in turn passes the message on through Juggernaut. The presenters showed a running example where the audience could place their home towns on a Google Map, which updated in real time as people used it. There is something fundamentally fun about coding real time interaction between multiple clients, at least that’s how I feel. Perhaps it goes back to my time as a developer on a large-scale European chat site, but ironically I worked on everything but the real time communication during that time.

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