OStatic

If you're running a Web site, then the last thing you want is to
? have a broken link.? Broken links look bad, frustrate users, and
? confuse search engines.? Even when links aren't broken, you can have
? pages that contain bad HTML, or server-side programs that fail when
? you enter data into them.? If this is an important issue to you,? then you should take a look at Tarantula,
? a Rails plugin that executes a number of simple tasks against your
? Web site, producing a detailed report (in HTML, of course)
? describing the URLs that it crawled, and the responses it received
? from each URL.

RailsConf, the main conference for the Ruby on Rails community, took place in Portland, Oregon over this past weekend. I wasn't able to attend, which is really a shame; I was at the first RailsConf in Chicago in 2006, and learned a great deal from the talks, as well as from the other Rails hackers in the audience. While the social aspects of a conference can't easily be recreated away from the conference, it is possible to watch and read a number of the presentations and lectures from RailsConf 2008. I have been doing that over the last few days, and have a few to recommend to other RailsConf-challenged fans.

The talk of RailsConf, the conference for Ruby on Rails that ended yesterday, was Gemstone's demonstration of MagLev, an implementation of Ruby that not only runs on Smalltalk, but that has access to Gemstone's highly scalable, very fast object database.οΎ  For years, web developers have worked with relational databases; does Gemstone's announcement mean that this is going to change in the near future?οΎ  Or are we getting too excited over a demo, ignoring real-world considerations that explain why relational databases remain popular, despite the aesthetics of object databases?

What happens when your database is the bottleneck for your Web application?οΎ  You could create a database cluster, or even add new hardware.οΎ  But an open-source library called memcached offers another solution, putting frequently needed data in a server-accessible memory cache, whose values can be retrieved quickly and easily from almost every library.οΎ  Memcached is in use on many popular sites, including Facebook and LiveJournal, and you might find that it provides just the solution you need to make your site act faster.

Are you using Ajax in your web application? If so, then you're probably using an open source JavaScript library, as well. Google announced earlier today that several popular JavaScript libraries, including Prototype and Dojo, will be freely available for web applications to incorporate in their HTML pages. By using Google's Ajax API, applications will be able to benefit from Google's fast content delivery network, as well as from the fact that browsers cache JavaScript files. So if any other application uses Google's copy of Prototype, your application will be able to used the cached version, saving time and bandwidth.

Coverity recently used its code analysis tools on more than 250 open source projects, in order to assess the general code quality of the software applications. The tests indicated that open source software is already of high quality -- but more interestingly, it found that the code had improved over time, with fewer defects detected this time than previously. What does it mean to find that open source software is continually improving?

A new player has entered the arena: Unbound is an open-source DNS server written, maintained, and distributed by a consortium of Internet companies that specialize in domain-name sales and management (NLnet Labs, Verisign, Nominet, and Kirei), and released under the BSD license. As Mike noted, Unbound has the potential to challenge the DNS monoculture.

Have you ever wondered how the same program can work across so many different flavors of Unix?οΎ  One of the behind-the-scenes systems that makes this happen is GNU Autoconf, a program that makes it possible to write source code in a way that will work on many different computers.οΎ  Unix systems are largely, but not completely, source-code compatible, and Autoconf makes it possible for a programmer to identify these differences when the program is compiled, papering over them in the source code itself.οΎ 

Thinking about using open-source software in your business? That's a great idea, and might well save you money. But don't assume that the only cost will be installing and configuring the program. No, the biggest cost will be integrating your new program into your organization. The integration may well require a consultant, or an in-house expert in these matters. But even so, using open-source software almost guarantees that the integration will be easier and cheaper than would be the case with proprietary software.

If you have switched to the Mac because of its Unix underpinnings and elegant GUI, then you aren't alone. If you want to install open source packages on your Mac, then you have at least two good options -- MacPorts and Fink. Installing Fink not only gives you access to a large number of open source programs, but lets you track which programs are installed on your computer, handles dependencies, and helps you to upgrade with a minimum of fuss.