Interesting Things

• Project Sprouts from Luke Bayes “an open-source, cross-platform project generation and configuration tool for ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3, Adobe AIR Flash and Flex projects”

“Project Sprouts was originally designed (as AsProject) to solve a specific set of problems and was later entirely refactored to become a modular set of libraries that are built on top of Ruby, RubyGems and Rake.” — Luke Bayes

• Sencha Touch 1.0 Ships – Now Free!

“So how will Sencha monetize? The company plans to sell its tools, like Sencha Animator, at a premium. It’ll also offer premium support plans.” — Tech Crunch

Helps

“Does anyone have experience with (slower) performance on EC2 compared to Heroku”

Some suggestions:

• Test network lag
• The small instance, the default, is just too wimpy to run as an application server
• Make sure your database instance is big enough, and has enough memory
• Any experience with RDS?

“Can you run cucumber with its own database instance?”

Responses:

• By default, Cuke creates its own environment, but piggy-backs on the test database

...
cucumber:
  <<: *TEST
...

• rake db:test:prepare is wired to :test and won’t support a :cucumber in the database.yml without extra rake tasks that have continuing maintenance costs
• I’ve used the parallel_tests gem in the past, which has managed to retrofit db:test:prepare to work with multiple test databases, but it did require an extra step after each migration (and it didn’t play well with postgres text indexes).