Excellent Localmemcache

Yesterday’s Munich on Rails meetup was the usual mix of interesting talks and geeky, delightful conversations. When I say “usual”, I of course mean it’s been the kind of evening I by now kind of expect. ;) Many thanks to Roland for organizing and the Experteers guys for the venue and the food. Nom!

Anyways: interesting talks.

Marco Otte-Witte presented his Excellent gem (gotta love the name) for static code analysis. It’s mostly aimed towards checking Rails code for smell, although —and he made that clear— it’s not targetted at people who strive for the blissful state of “zero warnings”. It’s more relaxed in that way; merely showing you unusual (or stupid or silly) parts of your code, such as missing validations in your models or having instance variables in your partials and the likes. Sadly, at the moment it’s not dealing with HAML templates yet, just ERB. (He’s looking for volunteers, by the way.;)) Here are the slides:

I can actually see myself using it.

And then Sven C. Koehler presented his somewhat irritatingly named¹ yet spiffy Localmemcache. It’s a local, shared-memory-based, persistent key/value store, which looks pretty fascinating. I was a wee bit confused by it until it finally clicked — you wouldn’t be able to tell from its name, but it’s not related to memcached. Aha! It’s a C library with Ruby bindings which offers a more or less simple storage system (values are of the type String, but of course that would include Marshal‘ed data) and apparently blazingly fast — his benchmarks showed that Localmemcache is almost as fast as accessing native Ruby hashes. Its not for everyone —for example, as I understand, it requires a 64-bit Unix system— but it looks like a pretty interesting alternative to memcached for single-machine setups like, say, your single production machine or your local dev box. This should ease the issue of sharing data between different Ruby processes, for example. I’m definitely going to check that out.

Oh, and Peter Schrammel presented a concept for a truly private asset server. As I’m not entirely sure whether this is really public information yet, I’ll keep my yapper shut here. :)

Afterwards we all headed to the Park Café for conversations and drinks. All in all a very nice evening, even though I was still a bit groggy from the day before — the München Twittwoch. (Which reminds me, I should probably whip up a quick post about that as well. Eh.)

Again: my thanks go to the MoR organizers and all the people who showed up, I had a good time. :)

Update: Artikel von Marco zu Excellent auf RailsMagazin.de