GOC

Intridea has announced the launch of Acts As Community, described by company officials as "the first social network custom-tailored to encourage communication and collaboration among users of the Ruby programming language."

 

Through a number of tools and sharing methods, company officials say, Rubyists "can be more informed and learn from their colleagues in ways never before possible." AAC is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, which is being held May 29-June 1, 2008 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

 
Acts As Community provides an all-inclusive Ruby community for sharing and communications in which Merbivores (devotees of the Merb model-view-controller design method), Rails developers, and all Ruby users are welcome.

 

By joining AAC, IT professionals can "connect with other Rubyists, share experiences, ask questions, learn about new happenings in the Ruby community and find and post Ruby-related jobs."

The Acts As Community social network provides benefits in such areas as Open-Source Projects, where users can plug in the URL of their GitHub project to create a full profile, including forums, a blog, and more for their open-source software (OSS) projects.

 

There are also Personal Profiles , where members can "show off their latest blog posts and OSS contributions in a fully customizable interface," company officials say.

 

"As long-time active contributors to Ruby on Rails, directly and through our plug-ins, we've recognized first-hand the opportunities and innovation that come from interacting with our peers," said Barg Upender, Intridea founding partner and director of strategic partnerships. "We're happy to give back to the Ruby community, and are excited to see Acts As Community embraced so readily."

 

In other Intridea news the vendor has announced the debut of Scalr, what company officials describe as "the self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment" using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

 

For $50 per month, you can use Scalr to set up server farms capable of scaling up to 100,000 or more users. The on-demand service requires no installation or configuration. The product is being introduced in conjunction with RailsConf 2008, being held May 29 - June 1 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.

 

Scalr is built on Amazon Web Services and lets developers create server farms through a Web-based interface using pre-built Amazon Machine Images for load balancers, such as Pound or Nginx; application servers, including Apache among others; databases, such as MySQL; and a generic AMI that developers can customize.

 

Once a developer sets up a server farm, Scalr monitors and maintains it, providing automatic scaling, redundancy and failover as needed. When the load average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold, a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load, and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes, Scalr inserts a new machine of that type into the farm to replace it.