"Heartbeat" Posts
Posted in Heartbeat, Hosting, Ruby on Rails, Slingshot 
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CBQ
It’s tough finding a developer who doesn’t like Ruby on Rails. However, it’s also easy finding developers who think “Rails Deployment” is the next release of a horror movie series.
We’ve developed exclusively in Rails over the past 1.5 years, and a major piece missing from our development process was a simple system for deploying, managing, and monitoring our client applications.
Enter Heartbeat and one-click Capistrano deployment. With Heartbeat, you can run any of your applications’ Capistrano recipes and Rake tasks on a remote system from a single web page.
Watch Heartbeat deploy a Rails application [MOV | 6.9 MB]
Born on RailsDay 2006, Heartbeat is helping us overcome the most difficult part of the Rails life cycle. In a couple of weeks, we hope it will do the same for you.
Posted in Heartbeat, HowTo, Ruby on Rails Comments
CBQ
UPDATE: rails_cron is no longer available, and daemon_generator has moved. BackgrounDRB has gone through a major rewrite, and I’ve got a chapter on Background Processing in The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez. Thanks to Chris Johnson and Douglas F Shearer for the updated information.
Without a way to run long-running tasks, Heartbeat, our 2006 Rails Day Entry, wouldn’t have had a pulse.
Like Heartbeat, most web applications need to run regulary scheduled or long-running tasks at some point in their life-cycle. These tasks are often not inititated by a web request. How can you check the validity of a URL every 15 minutes? How do we get an eCommerce store to calculate the most popular items every 5 hours? How can we re-index our site for searching every day?
If you’ve ever had to do this, chances are you’ve used cron (the *nix tool used to schedule remote tasks) coupled with script/runner. However, wouldn’t it be great if you could maintain your tasks and background “jobs” inside the ruby language, or even better, as part of your Rails application?
Let’s explore two ways to do this: the excellent BackgrounDRb plugin by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, which was used to power Heartbeat, and the fabulous rails_cron by Kyle Maxwell.
Read more... 
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Heartbeat Comments
Derek
The demo is up – take Heartbeat for a spin.
It’s a single-web page control panel that lets you run any rake task within your application’s directory, from deployment to tests to migrations. If you can write a rake task, Heartbeat can execute it! Additionally, you can use it to monitor the uptime of your URLs.
The app makes extensive use of RJS templates and AJAX.
Heartbeat was built by myself (Derek Haynes) and Charles Brian Quinn of Highgroove Studios during the 24-Hour coding marathon that was Rails Day 2006.
We’ve got big plans for Heartbeat, especially as it relates to Slingshot, our Rails Business Hosting Service. Stay tuned.
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Heartbeat Comments
CBQ
Not only were we a Rails Day 2006 Sponsor, but we also competed.
Our entry is called Heartbeat. It’s a simple, elegant, web-based tool for monitoring and maintaining Rails-based applications. From the Heartbeat home page:
Monitor the uptime of URLs and run your application’s rake tasks. Manage your Rails applications from a web interface! Heartbeat can be extended however you want – if you can write a rake task, Heartbeat can execute it!
Here are some screenshots from the application we completed in 24 hours:
We’re not done with Heartbeat just yet. This is only the first 24 hours of development.
