Musings of a Trained Monkey

I am happy to see that ActiveMessaging (a13g<-corny) is returning to life. It was announced with a bit of fanfare by Obie in early 2006 and then disappeared.

Jon Tirsen sent out some invites for a new Google Group and introduced Andrew Kuklewicz as the new maintainer of the project. I think this will become the premier way for RoR apps to interact with Java backends in 2007. Take a look at the code and see how you can contribute!

I’ve been toying with switching over to Mephisto and spending some extra time studying memory consumption, which is quite a bit higher in Mephisto than Typo. Using the latest svn trunk of RubyGems (r1100), the bug with multiple Gem::GemPathSearcher instances being created has been fixed, but now there is a different problem. Multiple Gem::SourceIndex instances are created. I can see where this might be needed with the recent “incremental updates to the gem list” change that went into RubyGems, it doesn’t make sense to have these hanging around in memory for the lifetime of a Rails application.

I took the same approach to a fix as last time, adding the require and include for Singleton into the SourceIndex.rb class. This worked fine for loading up Mephisto and indeed reduced the memory use substantially.

r1100 without Singleton	– Gem::SourceIndex x2(1062363)
r1100 with Singleton	– Gem::SourceIndex x1(97621)

I haven’t checked to see how this change impairs RubyGems for getting new gems, update, etc. but it seems like there needs to be a different amount of information loaded for bootstrapping the gem command, versus a running Ruby or Ruby on Rails application.

• Does the running application really have a need to know the complete dependency hierarchy for all of the installed gems on a system?

• Even if your application did, would you want that information stored into memory from startup to shutdown?

Things have been busy on the work side of my activities lately. Work is currently revolving around Java and using Spring MVC. Since I have primarily focused on Ruby and Rails information on my blog, I've been reluctant to blog about where my head is at in the Java space. If someone is interested, leave a comment and I'll see what I can come up with.

Which isn't to say I am not tracking recent developments in the Rails community, just that I haven't had time to analyze their impact and vomit forth a blog entry or two :-)

Okay, one little morsel of my experience with Spring relates to one of the core tenets of Rails: "Convention over configuration".
It finally found a way into a Java web development framework!