Distributed Programming with Ruby

Product Author Bios

Mark Bates has been developing web applications of one kind or another since 1996. He has spent an ungodly amount of time programming Java, but thankfully he discovered Ruby in late 2005, and life has been much nicer since.

Since discovering Ruby, Mark has become a prominent member of the community. He has developed various open-source projects, such as Configatron, Cachetastic, Genosaurus, APN on Rails, and the Mack Framework, just to name a few. The Mack Framework brought Mark to the forefront of distributed programming in the Ruby community. Mack was a web framework designed from the ground up to aid in the development of distributed applications.

Mark has taught classes on both Ruby and Ruby on Rails. He has spoken at several Ruby gatherings, including 2008’s RubyConf, where he spoke about building distributed applications.

Mark has an honors degree in music from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He still likes to rock out on the weekends, but set times are now 10 p.m., not 2 a.m. He lives just outside of Boston with his wife Rachel and their sons Dylan and Leo, whom he missed very much when writing this book.

Mark can be found at http://www.markbates.com and http://github.com/markbates.

 “A must have title for the well-rounded Ruby programmer building advanced Rails applications and large systems!”

OBIE FERNANDEZ, Series Editor

Complete, Hands-On Guide to Building Advanced Distributed Applications with Ruby

Distributed programming techniques make applications easier to scale, develop, and deploy—especially in emerging cloud computing environments. Now, one of the Ruby community’s leading experts has written the first definitive guide to distributed programming with Ruby.

Mark Bates begins with a simple distributed application, and then walks through an increasingly complex series of examples, demonstrating solutions to the most common distributed programming problems.

Bates presents the industry’s most useful coverage of Ruby’s standard distributed programming libraries, DRb and Rinda. Next, he introduces powerful third-party tools, frameworks, and libraries designed to simplify Ruby distributed programming, including his own Distribunaut.

If you’re an experienced Ruby programmer or architect, this hands-on tutorial and practical reference will help you meet any distributed programming challenge, no matter how complex.

Coverage includes

•   Writing robust, secure, and interactive applications using DRb—and managing its drawbacks

•   Using Rinda to build applications with improved flexibility, fault tolerance, and service discovery

•   Simplifying DRb service management with RingyDingy

•   Utilizing Starfish to facilitate communication between distributed programs and to write MapReduce functions for processing

     large data sets

•   Using Politics to customize the processes running on individual server instances in a cloud computing environment

•   Providing reliable distributed queuing with the low-overhead Starling messaging server

•   Implementing comprehensive enterprise messaging with RabbitMQ and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)

•   Offloading heavyweight tasks with BackgrounDRb and DelayedJob

Related Article

Distributed Ruby: Mark Bates Sheds New Light

Online Sample Chapter

Distributed Programming with Ruby: Distribunaut

Sample Pages

Download the sample pages (includes Chapter 5 and Index)

Table of Contents

Foreword    ix

Preface    xi

Part I   Standard Library    1

Chapter 1    Distributed Ruby (DRb)     3

Hello World     4

Proprietary Ruby Objects     10

Security     17

Access Control Lists (ACLs)     18

DRb over SSL     21

ID Conversion     28

Built-in ID Converters     29

Building Your Own ID Converter     33

Using Multiple ID Converters     34

Conclusion     35

Endnotes     36

Chapter 2     Rinda     37

“Hello World” the Rinda Way     38

Understanding Tuples and TupleSpaces     44

Writing a Tuple to a TupleSpace    44

Reading a Tuple from a TupleSpace     45

Taking a Tuple from a TupleSpace     48

Reading All Tuples in a TupleSpace     52

Callbacks and Observers     53

Understanding Callbacks     54

Implementing Callbacks     55

Security with Rinda     59

Access Control Lists (ACLs)     59

Using Rinda over SSL    61

Selecting a RingServer    63

Renewing Rinda Services     70

Using a Numeric to Renew a Service     71

Using nil to Renew a Service     72

Using the SimpleRenewer Class     72

Custom Renewers     73

Conclusion     75

Endnotes     76

Part II   Third-Party Frameworks and Libraries     77

Chapter 3    RingyDingy     79

Installation     79

Getting Started with RingyDingy     80

“Hello World” the RingyDingy Way     81

Building a Distributed Logger with RingyDingy     82

Letting RingyDingy Shine     84

Conclusion     86

Chapter 4    Starfish     87

Installation     87

Getting Started with Starfish     88

“Hello World” the Starfish Way     90

Using the Starfish Binary    90

Saying Goodbye to the Starfish Binary    93

Building a Distributed Logger with Starfish     96

Letting Starfish Shine    99

MapReduce and Starfish     103

Using Starfish to MapReduce ActiveRecord     104

Using Starfish to MapReduce a File     110

Conclusion    112

Endnotes     113

Chapter 5    Distribunaut     115

Installation     116

Blastoff: Hello, World!     117

Building a Distributed Logger with Distribunaut     120

Avoiding Confusion of Services     123

Borrowing a Service with Distribunaut     126

Conclusion     128

Endnotes     129

Chapter 6    Politics     131

Installation     133

Working with Politics     135

Conclusion    141

Endnotes     142

Part III   Distributed Message Queues     143

Chapter 7    Starling     145

What Is a Distributed Message Queue?     145

Installation     147

Getting Started with Starling     148

“Hello World” the Starling Way     155

Building a Distributed Logger with Starling     157

Persisted Queues     158

Getting Starling Stats     158

Conclusion     162

Endnotes     162

Chapter 8    AMQP/RabbitMQ     163

What Is AMQP?     163

Installation     165

“Hello World” the AMQP Way     167

Building a Distributed Logger with AMQP     178

Persisted AMQP Queues     180

Subscribing to a Message Queue     184

Topic Queues     187

Fanout Queues     193

Conclusion     196

Endnotes     197

Part IV Distributed Programming with Ruby on Rails     199

Chapter 9    BackgrounDRb     201

Installation     202

Offloading Slow Tasks with BackgrounDRb     203

Configuring BackgrounDRb     211

Persisting BackgrounDRb Tasks     213

Caching Results with Memcached     217

Conclusion     220

Endnotes     221

Chapter 10  Delayed Job     223

Installation     223

Sending It Later with Delayed Job     225

Custom Workers and Delayed Job    230

Who’s on First, and When Does He Steal Second?     235

Configuring Delayed Job     237

Conclusion     240

Endnotes     241

Index     243