“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
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.
