When most Rails developers encounter LDAP, it’s usually for user authentication. And most of the time, there’s no choice, they’re working under a dictate that requires them to use it. Usually, this means Active Directory, but very occasionally something like OpenLDAP or the Sun Java Systems Directory Server.

We’ve just released the video for Hey… Is That Your Database Crying? from Aloha on Rails , in which Blythe Dunham walks you through tips and tricks for working with your relational database and ActiveRecord.

Enjoy the video, and mahalo to Panopto and ThinkTech Hawaii for making the videos possible!

For watchthatsite.com (not public yet) I have an instance on EC2 with Rails and MySQL but was looking for a more solid hosting solution for MySQL. And how fortunate, Amazon came out with the solution I need this week. Basically with two command line instructions you can start a new server with mysql configured, tuned, and secured. In this blog entry I will go through the steps that perform to move my sql database to Amazon RDS.

Heroku is a Ruby webapp hosting service that we first mentioned about two years ago. It started off as an online IDE of sorts, but is now a complete cloud platform for running Ruby webapps.

I’ve been working as a Ruby developer with Manchester digital agency, Stardotstar, for a few months now. Last week, I wrote my first post on the new Stardotstar blog: