I’m a big fan of CouchDB. I enjoy how they go about doing things and how you are able to use it without the need of drivers as its all RESTful based. As long as your language of choice has the ability to make RESTful calls and read JSON data then you’re all set. But before I really started to use CouchDB I did start looking at MongoDB, another Document data store.

To take the authentication with Sinatra a bit farther you may want to use another service to do your authentication against. This is some sample code adapted from a Rails example. This code takes use of the linkedin gem from Wynn Netherland to do the authentication and also make some calls to the LinkedIn API. There are other gems that just do authentication for many services like Facebook and Twitter but for this sample I wanted to be able to make additional calls to the LinkedIn API.

One of the things I’m heavily looking in to is Sinatra, it’s a micro-web framework which I feel gives you more freedom over your project and lets you rapidly prototype things out. You are able to keep a full app in one file which is perfect for use with Github’s Gist. Sinatra lets you quickly build web apps in a short amount of time with less complexity then a Rails app.

For a upcoming Ruby project that I plan on working on I want to be able to send small messages to myself with information from a form that gets filled out. Amazon has just updated Simple Notification Service to be able to send SMS messages along with emails. This fits in perfectly with what I’m looking for. Looking on Amazon’s Github page for the aws-sdk gem I didn’t see any sample code for using SNS and googling I couldn’t find any right away.

I haven’t been playing World of Warcraft for a bit, but I guess they did some big updates to the armory which stopped the code I had written before from running correctly. (Link to the old code, Ruby and Groovy) After looking in to what has changed, I found out they added a new REST API for Battle.net which lets you pull data easily without the need of tricking the server to pass you XML.

So for my posting for Project Euler 001, the Javascript code kind of upset me. It’s not nice to look at and doesn’t really solve the problem in a functional way. With Javascript being a functional programming language it didn’t sit well with me. Comparing the Javascript code to the Groovy and Ruby code there is one thing missing and it is the ‘Range’ type call. If I could have a call like that I could use some other calls like filter and reduce to get the same outcome.

Made this posting sometime ago but I’ve been forgetting to actually post it. When I was looking up some information on Scala I found a great video tutorial on youtube made by MadocDoyu, which can be found here. In part of the video he introduces the Project Euler, this project seems really interesting. I plan on solving problems time to time using many of the languages I have looked at. I’m hoping this will keep my skills in these languages up to date.

Yesterday I was looking around for some new Ruby gems to help with web scraping (also sometimes called screen scraping), I found Nokogiri which is a great gem for dealing with HTML/XML data. One of the great things about Nokogiri is that it lets you use CSS3 selectors to find the data your looking for. This kind of makes it like using jQuery but in Ruby. For working with one page and not interacting with a site Nokogiri is fine, but if you need something more, Mechanize most likely will do the trick.

One of the other things I’m trying to learn on my free time is Scala, like Groovy it’s a language that runs on top of the JVM and is both a object-oriented and functional programming language. One of the biggest places I know where its being used is Foursquare Same idea as the other postings I did for installing Groovy, Grails and jRuby. Head to the Scala home page at http://www.

I did some postings last year about SSH and making keys and how to move them to systems you are working with. What if you need to do this in reverse? You are the person setting up a system for others to work with and you want to pass the private key to the users. An example of this is Amazon’s EC2 setup where you get the private key to be able to log in to the VMs you make.