Ruby.war

I'm taking a break from the lead up to a release. I'm a little cooked and useless at the moment.

Pete and I worked on our deployment script last night. In the early days of our project, we thought we'd use Capistrano. Make no mistake, it is a great tool (I took it for a spin).

But when you are using JRuby, its a bit overkill.

I'm fairly new to the Ruby world, but I know the other deployment options for Ruby. They aren't awful, but they take a bit of work & have some moving parts to them.

A lot more work than handing over a .war file with a configured # of run-times to run within the JVM, a database script, and a runbook anyway. That in and of itself is compelling.

Oh yeah, you have to also run:

$apache-tomcat-6.0.14$ bin/startup.sh 

(that's the runbook)

Ruby Authorization and Entitlement

We are bearing down on our first release (first of many on a big roadmap). Times are crazy, yet a lot of fun. I feel strange posting here - its been a while. Well, at least I tweat fairly regularly.

Anyway, our final iteration of our initial release is primarily focused on authentication, authorization, and entitlement.

I have a feeling we'll end up rolling our own, but there are a number of Rails plug-ins out there for this purpose that may have some useful bits. Also, a number of Ruby based rules engines.

So far, my real tired google search turned up:

• RESTful Authentication
• ActiveRBAC
• Rools
• Ruleby

I'll dig into these tomorrow. Let me know if you have had success with these or any other plug-ins/gems that may be of use for a fairly sophisticated user authorization/entitlement impl.

I'll try to update this post with our findings.

19-MAR-2008 Update

We are still digging into this, but so far we haven't used any above given our situation, but Bill Katz Rails Authorization Plug-in looks somewhat promising so far. Seems easy enough to make work with SiteMinder in front of you.

27-MAR-2008 Update In case anyone stumbles upon this later, we ended up writing our own. Nothing against the other's we just didn't see enough compelling in them to take them on. Rolling our own seemed easiest.