Phat Site Blog

What breaks my heart on Tuesdays..

These past few weeks have been hectic on my WoW schedule, with 3.3.5 out three weeks ago, for North American Servers that is, and then Ruby Sanctum’s somewhat controversial opening.

What makes new content even more crazy for the players, like myself, who strive to experience it all? Server maintenance coinciding with the reset of raid lockout periods. One could make the point that server maintenance would be bad for someone’s schedule no matter what day it is on, but I am here to contend that regular maintenance should not be conducted on the same day that raid lockouts reset.

Why is this? well, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who races through a ton of content on Tuesdays, while the getting is still good for finding fresh members to group up with. this results in a hectic raiding schedule for Tuesdays: Log on, find out what’s the weekly. See if Alliance has Wintergrasp. create a 25 man VoA group. Finish 25m, and create a 10m unique class/role group. create and complete weekly. THEN, if my guild has it set, a 10-man ICC run.

Sure, I could space out these runs, but then the potential for finding good, fresh groups becomes a lot worse. And still attempting to fit all this in on days when server maintenance runs late (2 hour delay, another hour delay, then 2 more hours, etc.), such as it did last week, is pretty much impossible. My (and others’) raid schedule gets screwed.

And then there’s days of extended maintenance, such as back on the 30th, when 74 of the N.a. servers were down for an entire 24-hour period. Raiders who wanted to get in their content early-on in the raid lockout period were instead forced to shift their schedules back a day.

So why can’t Blizzard move maintenance to a day such as Sunday or Monday, when most people are saved to those raids we’re trying to get into on Tuesdays?

I don’t have an extreme memory of things throughout World of Warcraft’s 5-year lifespan like my fellow Lore Hound, iTZKooPA. though, from farming dozens of the Vanilla and BC raids in WoW, I have learned that resets were not always the same as they are today. some raids had only a few ample days before the reset, and you could attempt them again, or re-farm them for that coveted axe or helm you’re after.

However, Blizzard has boasted (and Lore Hound has covered) that their philosophy for game theory and development is doing just that, developing. Blizzard has adapted to this “one week” lockout period for a singular raid, for every raid.

As for today, server maintenance got extended by only one hour to noon PST. not as bad as last week, at least! I’m still hoping Blizzard gains the senses to move maintenance day to another day in the week. I’m all for losing a day of WoW to have clean-running servers, but just wish it didn’t have to coincide on reset day.

What do you think, readers? is any day a bad day for realm maintenance? or would you, like me, prefer it at a different point of the week?

Late Server Maintenance Raid Lockout Reset = Raiding Mayhem …

Gone are the days of coding entire PHP apps from scratch. these are the 5 forerunners for the next generation of PHP frameworks. Each one of these frameworks has some foreword thinking quality that sets them apart from the PHP frameworks of yesterday. Many of these are a response to the recent Ruby on Rails, rapid application development hype, and some, like PHP on Trax is a direct port of Ruby on Rails. Of the frameworks listed below, I have learned AGAVI as well as Symfony. I can honestly say I don’t have the desire to build a PHP app from scratch ever again. these frameworks make it so easy to get started and have a working app you’ll want to create apps just for the hell of it.I had the pleasure of learning and embracing the symfony framework while working at NAT1ON on an AJAX shoutbox service. Symfony boasts easy AJAX implementation and includes the entire Script.aculo.us suite of Javascript effects. Symfony also has the ability to generate propel CRUD and application scaffolding from an already constructed SQL database. That means it objectifies all the SQL language and makes creating database driven apps easy as pie.Symfony Homepage – AJAX Screencast

CakePHP recently announced their 1.0 stable version of their framework. Cake’s strongly Object Oriented nature makes it easy for anyone who has had OO experience to pick up. Like all of the other frameworks mentioned here Cake is keen on rapid application development as well as AJAX implementation. if you have never learned a PHP framework CakePHP might be the way to go, since the influx of users surrounding its 1.0 release will ensure an active community for the next couple of months.CakePHP Homepage-15 Minute Blog Tutorial

PHPArch.com recently nominated Zend for the best Application Dev tool and with 95,000 download Zend’s success cannot be disputed. They are also partnered with Ning.com, an online platform for painlessly creating web apps. Zend promises to be the backbone of the next generation of web applications.Zend Homepage

Avagi is the other framework that I have personal experience with, although its a lot less fun to work with than Symfony it strongly adheres to the MVC philosophy and is a good bet for anyone who requires that type of structure. Being a branch from the popular MOJAVI project there is a relatively strong and active user base both in the forums as well as IRC channels.Agavi Homepage – QuickStart Movie

PHP on Trax is essentially a direct port of Ruby on Rails, in fact it used to be called PHP on Rails until someone decided that “trax” and “rails” are the same thing. Like Ruby on Rails and the other frameworks here PHP on Trax adheres to the MVC principle tightly. if you are a Rails programmer and you really want to do rails like development but are stuck in a PHP environment then PHP on Trax would be your best bet.PHP on Trax Homepage

While each one of these frameworks fits a specific need they all maintain qualities that are redefining the web, making it a more usable fun place to work. Given that all these are heavily MVC, object oriented constructs they should all be easy to learn, but the truth is each one has picky nuances that don’t specifically translate from one to the other. Case in point choose one, stick to it, master it, create the next killer app.

5 Next Generation PHP Frameworks

Please accept the terms of service and privacy policy

If you need users the accept the terms of services and privcay policy or your rails application there is a simple way to handle this without a database field or javascript. It’s using the validation methods built into rails. Simply add the following code to your User model for example

validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service

Then in your view add the following to your view and you will get a checkbox on the page that users will be required to check.

<%= check_box :user, :terms_of_service %>

This will then add this validation rule to your models validation rules and when you try to submit the form without checking the checkbox you get a nice little validation message letting you know hey you need to accept this.

Of course you can have your own validation message displayed like so

validates_acceptance_of :terms_of_service, :message => ‘ and the privacy policy must be accepted’

Tags: rails, ruby on rails, validates_acceptance_of, validation

Please accept the terms of service and privacy policy | Sentia …

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — 03/30/10 — Engine Yard, the leading cloud computing platform for Ruby on Rails, today announced the industry’s first JRuby professional support offering. JRuby allows Java developers to use Ruby to efficiently expand the capabilities of Java applications, or create entirely new applications that leverage an existing investment in Java. by utilizing professional support for JRuby, customers can take advantage of Engine Yard’s world-class Ruby, Rails and JRuby experts to accelerate success of their projects.

“JRuby provided the critical features we needed to build our information store, including scalability, performance, and multi-threading,” said Ben Summers, Technical Director of OneIS Ltd. “We wanted to use the Java libraries and JVM, but we didn’t want to write in Java because we have lots of existing Ruby code. the interpreter runs our code 2x faster, and the architectural improvements enabled by JRuby’s proper multi-threading and Java integration allowed us to simplify the application into one process, which overall is 5x faster than before. JRuby has given us great performance, allowed us to reduce the lines of code by about 10%, and helped us make the application much easier to develop and deploy.”

Developers report they are 2x-5x more productive programming in Ruby than in Java according to recent Engine Yard survey data. this is because unlike other JVM-based web-frameworks, JRuby provides unique productivity benefits to Java teams including the ability to deploy to the same servers, use the same libraries, and integrate with existing Java code and applications. For more details on the benefits Ruby can offer Java teams and how to get started with JRuby, developers are invited to download the quick-start guide at: http://bit.ly/97UaoD

“Organizations that made smart investments in Java for its security and reliability are now adding JRuby to their environments because it enables them to take advantage of the productivity benefits Ruby delivers,” said Charles Nutter, co-lead of the JRuby core team at Engine Yard. “Commercial-grade support for JRuby from Engine Yard is another important step towards establishing Ruby on Rails as the best choice for next-generation development in the enterprise.”

A Java implementation of the Ruby programming language, JRuby allows organizations to build secure, high-performance application functionality with Ruby while utilizing existing Java code and the JVM. Commercial JRuby support from Engine Yard benefits organizations using both Java and Ruby by providing direct access to the Ruby, Rails and JRuby experts at Engine Yard.

“JRuby, Ruby on Rails, and the JVM provide a razor sharp tool set to deliver SOA to existing Java applications, along with rapid development of new applications. Combined with our support offering, enterprises will realize a greater ROI on their Java investments,” said Tom Mornini, CTO of Engine Yard. “Java-based enterprises demand commercial support for any technology they use — with Engine Yard’s combined engineering expertise in Rails, Ruby, and JRuby our new support offering meets and exceeds that requirement.”

Commercial JRuby support from Engine Yard includes developer assistance and advice on how to tune and optimize JRuby in production environments. It also covers the most recent version of JRuby and the following libraries: jruby-openssl, activerecord-jdbc-adapter, warbler, jruby-rack. It also includes support for bundled JRuby components such as Joni, Yecht, and jrubyffi. More information on Engine Yard commercial JRuby support is available at: http://bit.ly/cCYHdG

About Engine Yard
Engine Yard (http://www.engineyard.com) provides cloud computing technologies and services for Ruby on Rails, including Engine Yard Cloud, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for web developers and web teams. It provides easy-to-use, automated Rails application deployment and management with a design philosophy that allows easy migration of existing applications. Engine Yard employs top industry experts and sponsors or contributes to many Open Source projects and efforts such as Ruby on Rails (www.rubyonrails.org), JRuby (www.jruby.org) and Rubinius (www.rubini.us). Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard investors include Benchmark Capital, new Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com among others.

Media Contact
Horn Group for Engine Yard
Sabrina Cook
scook@horngroup.com
415.905.4013

Engine Yard Introduces First JRuby Support Service in the Industry