One of the big things you’ll hear about Ruby on Rails is that it’s hard to scale. In my opinion, that’s not really an issue that one should be addressing on the framework level. Scaling, in my opinion, should be something reserved for backend databases and servers. From what I’ve read, you should be able to slap on a MySQL proxy and an Apache load balancer in front of multiple mongrel servers, but I digress.

With all the Twitter Rails scaling issues, it’s funny to see this headline from TechCrunch. Guys over at Twitter have renounced this claim though.

Will this make me abandon my quest for learning Ruby on Rails? I highly doubt it. Scaling becomes an issue on extremely high traffic sites. And a lot of the issues that come into play with such a high traffic site, can be easily remedied by things like optimizing queries and caching.

Source: Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails [TechCrunch]

Popularity: 7%

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Somehow I don’t think most people understood what my bias comparison of CakePHP vs Ruby on rails meant. The last few visitors to comments seem to have been Rails fans. One of them seems to think that I shouldn’t touch Ruby on Rails with a ten foot pole and should stick with CakePHP. He doesn’t want someone like me in their community. The other comment, I get the opposite vibe from. He strikes me as a PHP fan, who thinks I’m too lazy for the PHP community.

To all the folks that haven’t seem to understand my whole objective, let me help you guys out. I have general interests in a lot of areas and I also work a 9 to 5 job. So I don’t really have the time and dedication required to poor my heart and sole into everything that comes along. I do a brief overview of something before I spend tons of time delving into it. People are pissed that I’m comparing CakePHP to Ruby on Rails and haven’t even tried it yet. This is where the brief overview comes in; I took a quick look and realized that for what I was doing at the time, Ruby on Rails would have been more trouble that it was worth.

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So it’s been about a weeks since it was out, so I figure, why not? After all I have the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, so this should be a breeze. Now this plugin makes upgrading Wordpress ridiculously simple. It handles file backups, database backups, deactivating and reactivating all plugins, etc.

So I go through the process and I’m not totally disappointed. There were the normal problems we have with all upgrades and some new ones:

• Theme Issues: This only happened on one of my blogs. Heck, it’s an old theme, so that’s to be expected. The widgets didn’t quite work right, but it was fixable.
• Plugin Issues: Of course there will be those. Some plugins haven’t been updated yet, some just required me to update them. And with the new plugin update feature, it was quite easy to fix these problems. Then, there are some plugins I just had to totally disable, but upgrades for these are coming out everyday. I’m down to one old plugin that hasn’t been updated yet.

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This is the third installment of my Auth Component Tutorial. This tutorial builds on the first installment, so make sure you grab the download file:

  CakePHP Auth 1 (4.3 KB, 1,647 hits)

You'll find it on almost every popular web site's login page; a nice lil' checkbox that says "Remember Me". It seems to have become a basic addition to any page with a login form. Generally, when a user logs into a web site, he's logged in until his session expires. Which usually translates to when they close the browser window or when they allow the session to timeout.

With a Remember Me cookie, you hit the lil' checkbox and it stores a lil' cookie on the user's computer. This cookie can contain various information (we'll get to that later) but it essentially enables the user to bypass the login process the next time he comes to the page requiring authentication.

So, the simplest way to proceed is to list changes by file, so strap in your seat belts, here goes.

The Obvious, The Login Form - login.ctp

Now of course you need to add the checkbox and a label for said checkbox. Simple enough:

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Now I don't have to tell you guys about all the goodies that Wordpress 2.5 brings, but I'll name a few anyways:

• New fresh Admin theme
• Nice Dashboard
• You can modify the link for "Incoming Links". Technorati anyone?
• Finally included Tag Management
• Concurrent Post Editing Protection
• One Click Plugin upgrades. Oh yes. It's about time.
• Built in Gallery
• Nice Flash Media Uploader

There's just ONE thing that rubs me the wrong way.

They've gone an given the admin theme a fixed width layout, designed for a 1024px monitor. Why, Wordpress, why? This is really a pain, after I decided to get (not one, but) two 19" Wide Screen LCD monitors. Luckily, there's a plugin that puts things back into perspective.

Popularity: 16%

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I can't remember where exactly I heard about this web host, but InsaneGB.com sounded like a great deal. You can read their website for more details, but in a nutshell they got PHP 5, MySQL 4, and everything (Databases, Add-on domains, etc) is unlimited except disk space and bandwidth. They give you 5GB for disk space and 20GB on bandwidth per month. Which is great for a free host, if you ask me; heck, they even offer cron jobs.

Testing Their Setup

So I decided to give them a shot. I put up my personal blog on their server. In retrospect, maybe that wasn't such a great idea, but I did it anyway. At first everything was great. Stuff was fast and everything was popping up instantly. There were some things that most would consider acceptable for a free host.

• I couldn't run any PHP ini_set commands

  So there's no increasing running time for scripts. I guess I would live without that.

• You can't open/download any files from outside servers

  This I came across when trying to use some of my Wordpress plugins that automatically install plugins and automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation. Oh, well.

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One thing that has plagued me as a designer for many years is the ability to test my designs in multiple web browsers. Back in the day, computers came with Internet Explorer 5.5 and that's it. Installing a later version would always overwrite the previous one, so it became difficult to test my designs properly.

The Easy Guys - Netscape and Opera

Testing in Netscape is rather easy. You can download and install multiple versions of Netscape and they have no interaction with each other as long as you install them to different folders. That's it.

Opera follows the same process.

A Bit Trickier - Firefox

Firefox is slightly more difficult, but still a piece of cake. Head over to Portable Apps and grab the latest version of Firefox Portable. While you're there, look up the legacy versions that fit your fancy and expand each to a different folder.

These are self contained consolidations of the browsers. Rather than sticking their settings in Documents and Settings/Application Data/, they dump all their settings in their respective folders.

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Now if you're into Web 2.0 and haven't heard of the Lightbox script, then you must be living under a rock. If this is your first time crawling out from under that rock, you can get a quick sample of the Lightbox effect here. Just click on the first picture and watch the magic.

The Lightbox effect is used to pop up a larger image into the forefront of a web page. You start out with a link, usually a thumbnail of the large image. When the user clicks, the large image pops out and the rest of the web page is faded out.

The original Lightbox script uses the Prototype/script.aculo.us combo, so some may complain that it's a bit code heavy. I would tend to agree, since I'm a fan of jQuery however, since CakePHP still uses Prototpye/script.aculo.us for their AJAX functionality, I'm not ready to jump ship just yet.

For those who are, here's a light of the the Lightbox imitations.

There's one called Thickbox, and another version (Slightly thickerbox), which use jQuery, however, it doesn't have the same feel as the original Lightbox script that I've gotten used to.

Merry Christmas and Happy Scripting!

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