As you may have heard, this year there aren't any Ruby projects as part of this year's Google Summer of Code. The Ruby community's response to this is a pretty amazing validation of the awesomeness of us! We have created our own Ruby Summer of Code, and raised $100K in just 3 days to sponsor 20 students to work on Ruby open source projects. That's actually a lot more than Google would have sponsored anyway. And Pivotal Labs is one of the six full-project sponsors, woot! We're sponsoring $5K, the amount to cover one student's work full time for the whole summer.

We will no doubt have some pivots volunteering for mentor spots. If you want to volunteer to mentor, you need to apply by the end of this week (April 3rd).

Pivotal Labs is also going to be providing desk space for (a couple?) local students who want to come work in the office for the summer - they'll get to come to our daily standups, eat breakfast with us, attend our tech talks, play Pivot Pong, and just be part of the Pivotal experience. We hope there are some local students who participate in RSoC and that someone comes to hang out with us for the summer. It's also likely that some local students would get to do a report on their projects at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in September.

Students can apply for spots during the period April 5th-23rd.

Thanks to everyone for stepping up and supporting this great response. This is the kind of thing that makes being a Ruby developer so gratifying, and so fun too.

Rails 3 is now beta and the core team is asking people to try it out and report issues back. We decided to do a small spike to get some experience with the upgrade process and see if we could help identify any problems. The application we worked on was our own Pivotal Pulse CI aggregation display (which you can see in action).

Here's a quick overview of the steps we went through:

1. Install Ruby 1.8.7 using RVM
2. Install Rails beta gems
3. Upgrade the app using the rails_upgrade plugin
4. Tweak things a lot
5. Drop incompatible dependencies
6. Profit!

One of the things I've always liked least about building web applications is dealing with mod_rewrite. It's a very useful feature, but it's quirky and the config languages for webservers are difficult to use (at least from my experience with Apache and Nginx). But like it or not, mod_rewrite is often a necessary part of a web app. Until now...

Recently I had to redo the rewrite rules for pivotallabs.com when we switched from Apache to Nginx, which we did when moving to EngineYard's cloud hosting. Since then our Nginx config has grown to over 150 lines, mainly to deal with multiple virtual hosts.

Now, managing a custom Nginx config on the EY cloud system isn't as simple as I'd like, especially when the configs are different on production and demo environments. (Demo is what we call our usual environment for doing feature acceptance.) It's far easier to use the automatically generated config, but that doesn't work when you need to support multiple domain names.

The obvious thing to do was to move the rewrite/redirect logic out of the Nginx config. I found a couple Rack middleware components that did something sort of like what we needed, but none of them were sufficient for what we needed. So we created our own.

Refraction is a Rack middleware replacement for mod_rewrite. With Refraction we were able to replace our 150+ line Nginx config with a 50 line Ruby file, and go back to using the standard automatically generated config on EY cloud.

Here's an example Refraction config file:

Refraction.configure do |req|
  feedburner  = "http://feeds.pivotallabs.com/pivotallabs"

  if req.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] !~ /FeedBurner|FeedValidator/ && req.host =~ /pivotallabs.com/
    case req.path
    when %r{^/(talks|blabs|blog).(atom|rss)$}        ; req.found! "#{feedburner}/#{$1}.#{$2}"
    when %r{^/users/(chris|edward)/blog.(atom|rss)$} ; req.found! "#{feedburner}/#{$1}.#{$2}"
    end
  else
    case req.host
    when 'tweed.pivotallabs.com'
      req.rewrite! "http://pivotallabs.com/tweed#{req.path}"
    when /([-\w]+.)?pivotallabs.com/
      # passthrough with no change
    else  # wildcard domains (e.g. pivotalabs.com)
      req.permanent! :host => "pivotallabs.com"
    end
  end
end

These rules are extracted from the full config file for pivotallabs.com. They redirect high-traffic syndication feeds to feedburner, rewrite a subdomain (tweed.pivotallabs.com) to a path for that sub-site (pivotallabs.com/tweed), and redirect some aliases to our standard domain name (pivotalabs anyone?).

Refraction is thread-safe, which means you can put it outside the Rack::Lock, something we felt was important for performance. It will never have the performance of mod_rewrite, but it will certainly be better than handling redirections in Rails itself.

Full documentation is available in the README. Contributions welcome.

And of course big thanks to Sam Pierson and Wai Lun Mang who both paired with me on developing Refraction.