Monday, April 24, 2006
REST, Replicate, and Repurpose
LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
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The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com
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Greetings, readers. This week your editor is at the MySQL User's
Conference learning how to be a database administrator. (It's not that
your editor wants to be a database administrator, but he finds it valuable
to know how database administrators think. So far, they seem justifiably
paranoid about losing data.)
Psychology aside, this is the Linux newsletter, a weekly recap of open
source and free software tutorials, opinions, and news as seen on the
O'Reilly Network.
Sister site XML.com talks occasionally about good web design practices.
(There's something about standards that makes life easier.) One such
article is "Putting REST on Rails." Dan Kubb explains how sticking with
the standards of HTTP conventions give you benefits such as caching and
scalability. Ruby on Rails does too. Here's how to make Rails
RESTful--and work with the system, not against it:
<http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/04/19/rest-on-rails.html>
If writing your own website isn't your idea of a good time, and if a CMS
is more work than you want, why not run your site as a weblog? OK, the
default chronological weblog-like view may not be what you want, but you
can customize what you get with ease. John McCreesh recently replaced a
CMS with WordPress. He bets you can't tell what actually runs the site.
He can--it's so much easier to update:
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/04/20/from-weblog-to-cms.html>
Database replication and clustering are both good ways to provide high
availability and better scalability as your application needs increase.
If you run MySQL, MySQL Cluster isn't your only approach. Nor is it
necessarily the best approach even as of MySQL 5.0. Undeterrable hacker
Giuseppe Maxia has uncovered a way to produce a multi-master, recoverable,
high-availability replication system with MySQL 5.0 that can work reliably
today. Even better, he has a downloadable example system you can test.
Here's "Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques":
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/04/20/advanced-mysql-replication.html>
In weblogs this week, Austin Ziegler announced a Ruby hackathon in Toronto:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/04/trughat_20061.html>
Gregory Brown marveled at the language extensions possible with Ruby's
OOness, open classes, and duck typing:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/04/fun_with_rubys_standard_librar.html>
Dave Cross apologized for helping to write the Template Toolkit book,
which apparently is useful even to spammers:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/spamming_badgers.html>
Your editor demonstrated how to port procedural Perl tests to the reusable
Test::Class style:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/refactoring_everything_day_7.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/refactoring_everything_day_8.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/refactoring_everything_day_9.html>
He also repeated an announcement of Perl's new Artistic License 2.0 (at
least the draft):
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/perls_new_license_and_contribu.html>
Sam Smith, as do many people, wondered why large companies that use
OpenSSH are reluctant to help fund OpenSSH development:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/openssh_funding.html>
Caitlyn Martin published her first impressions of Fedora Core 5:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/04/first_impressions_fedora_core.html>
Keep looking on the site for information about the MySQL conference as the
week goes on.
See you next time,
- c
chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network
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ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week
1. From Weblog to CMS with WordPress
Weblog software is now so easy to use that almost anyone can keep a weblog
up-to-date. In some cases, it's almost powerful enough to replace a more
traditional content management system. John McCreesh describes how he
replaced his CMS with WordPress to run a community site.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/04/20/from-weblog-to-cms.html>
***
2. Ajax on Rails
XMLHttpRequest and Ruby on Rails are two hot topics in web development. As
you ought to expect by now, they work really well together. Curt Hibbs
explains the minimal Ajax you need to know and the minimal Ruby you need
to write to Ajax-ify your Rails applications.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html>
***
3. Building a FreeBSD Build System
Keeping a single BSD system up to date is relatively easy. Keeping a whole
business full of servers fresh with patches and new applications and
updates is more work--unless you take advantage of the ports system. Bjorn
Nelson walks through the design and implementation of a build system
usable to push fresh binaries to as many servers as you have.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/04/13/freebsd-build-system.html>
***
4. PHP Form Handling
If your PHP program is a dynamic web page (and it probably is) and your
PHP program is dealing with user input (and it probably is), then you need
to work with HTML forms. David Sklar, author of Learning PHP 5, offers
tips for simplifying, securing, and organizing your form-handling PHP
code.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/08/26/PHPformhandling.html>
***
5. Installing Software on Debian
Debian GNU/Linux is a powerful and popular community-developed Linux
distribution--and the basis for several other useful and usable
distributions. One of the reasons for its popularity is the ease of
installing and maintaining software. Edd Dumbill, Debian developer and
GNU/Linux advocate, shows how to use Debian's tools to find and install
software packages.
<http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/04/06/aptitude_and_apt_get.html>
***
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