I realized that it’s been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing… ;) Anyway, I figure I’ll try to get back into the habit of publishing smaller posts, but hopefully more regularly. Let’s see how it goes… Ever since I went back into startup life four months ago, I’ve had the chance to play with a lot of exciting technologies, so there’s plenty of stuff to write about....

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Rails 2.1 natively supports incoming JSON requests. Unfortunately, it still struggles with JSON data containing non-ASCII characters. According to the JSON spec, JSON fully supports UTF-8 encoded text, so with a few exceptions it generally should not be necessary to escape non-ASCII characters with \u Unicode escape sequences. However, many JSON libraries appear to escape all non-ASCII text in this fashion. This in itself should not be a problem, but ActiveSupport::JSON currently does not properly parse JSON containing \u escapes, resulting in strings with literal \u escape sequences rather than the desired UTF-8 encoded characters....

I’ve been meaning to set up a network monitoring tool at work for a while. We have a couple of different applications using various technologies (currently mainly Ruby on Rails and PHP), running on various VPS servers. While we are using Monit to keep an eye on our Rails apps and restart them if necessary, as well as a couple of custom webpages to track vital and growth stats of our apps, we currently don’t use any monitoring or (perhaps more importantly) alerting tools beyond that....

According to this blog post and several mentions on Twitter, Phusion announced today’s release of Passenger (aka mod_rails) 2.0 at RailsConf. Apparently, Passenger 2.0 will be Rack compliant and thus support not only Rails, but any Rack compatible web framework, including Merb and Sinatra. Interestingly, Passenger will not even be limited to Ruby any more and extend their support to WSGI, the Python web adapter framework that inspired Rack in the first place....

Earlier this week, we tried to figure out the cleanest and easiest way to get our Rails app to accept incoming JSON requests. Up until recently, developers were able to use various Rails plugins for this purpose, such as the json_request plugin. Luckily, it turns out that full support for JSON was added to Rails in April, making it a first class citizen along with XML and regular URL-encoded form fields....