Marc-André Cournoyer has released a new web server called Thin. Thin is built upon Mongrel and 2 other ruby packages, Event Machine and Rack, and is promised to be much faster than mongrel, which is no small feat. Thin gets the extra-speed by being 100% single-threaded and could be used to serve pages from ruby web frameworks, like Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails’s speed and scalability has been questionned, especially before mongrel appeared; everyone would point out for instance Twitter’s frequent errors to highlight Rails’s “fragility”. As I see it, Thin, in theory, has lots of potential and kill the speed problem, although I am still wondering how it serves concurrent requests in production mode.

Marc-André Cournoyer previously released refactormycode, a place where programmers could get help from other members for their code, as well as multiple plugins for Rails. His track record is impressive, and he is raising the bar very high for the rest of us. I am not sure what he is going to do next. Maybe a framework? Oh wait, it’s already done too. Here’s an idea: create a new programming language.

A codeFest is a weekend sprint where programmers gather to add features to web applications. Last year’s codeFest theme was openID, and was reported to be very successful. The upcoming codeFest is planned Jan 5th and 6th, and the topic is to add microformats to your favourite applications. It is hosted at La Bande Passante, 8655 St-Denis.

A microformat is a web-based data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes and attributes. This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

While microformats have generated a lot of interest amongst the open source community and developers, it hasn’t yet gained any public traction. However, it’s easy to imagine tools, applications and software that would make microformats (re)usable and make it as popular and useful as the RSS/atom format. I am myself working on a microformat project with other montréalers, and will come at the event.

Furthermore, the event is focused on php and on Free / Open Source applications. For more info, there is an event page on facebook.

CakeMail, which was presented at StartupCampToronto last week, has unveiled a new package for developers who wish to extend their platform.

Duncan Moore writes that they offer the package at $99, but the value of a package is worth between $3,000 and $12,000 annually. It gives access to the API and developers can also send 5000 monthly emails. Developers willing to join the program must be willing to contribute to the community and provide feedback to CakeMail.

This is a great way for the Code Kitchen team to increase the adoption rate of their service, while getting more tools, plugins, and interfaces for CakeMail. If you are working with emails, you can sign up now.

QuebecTorrent.com, a local torrent tracker, is entagled in a lawsuit started last month by the Canadian music industry. They received first a cease&desist order, but eventually won this first attempt and are still online. The case is just starting though, with ongoing developments.

Of course, record companies like Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Music Canada are describing themselves as victims, and the website’s owner and administrator as pirates who ripped off hard-working artists. On the other hand, QuebecTorrent’s owner, Sébastien Brulotte, changed the website’s “mission” for personal uses only, is calling his community’s members’ help, and is asking for help on various websites, notably digg. Furthermore, he was alarmed that the case would make a jurisprudential case and make thus all p2p websites like IsoHunt or TorrentBox in Canada illegal.

I have no knowledge of Québec&Canadian law about peer-to-peer sharing and fair use, but here is nonetheless a comment by a Canadian who owns a web hosting company:

I’m not sure what is going on in Quebec But I believe it is more to do with the law not understanding what a torrent site is and the plaintiff’s trying to say the site holds the media itself. That here in Canada is 100% illegal. Though hosting index files related to a site is not. Therefore any torrent site that does not (Seed or Upload from the server) can not be charged with committing a crime. There even was a ruling by the supreme court of Canada in regards to downloading mp3’s that it is the same thing as going to a library and photo coping a page out of a book which people have been doing for decades. I’m sad to hear other company’s are not willing to defend their clients rights in a matter that is 100% ill legit. I do hope Quebec Torrents holds their ground and their host step up and help them instead of bowing to pressure that is unjust.

Surprisingly, the case has little to no press in the local press. I stumbled upon an article at La Presse which describes QuebecTorrent administrators as criminals who are about to be busted by the GRC. Other media groups in the province, like Québecor, are known to work hand-in-hand with the music industry.

Before the Karabunga team started montrealonrails.com, ruby on rails programmers were unheard of in Montréal, with startups like standoutjobs having a hard time to find “ruby gurus”. However, 35 people showed up for the first meetup, some experienced, some just curious about what’s up with all the excitement around the framework.

Currently, Python development is, I believe, at the same phase as Ruby on Rails 6 months ago. This is where Montreal Python comes, a new initiative by Arach Tchoupani. Its objective is to:

• raise awareness about Montreal’s python development community
• provide a place for local conversations about python software development
• organize meetups or talks in Montreal area to share knowledge and experience

This is very good for local developers. As far as I know, Akoha is using python for their platform, and so is embeddedcookbook, a web2.0 directory of electronic parts made by 2 montréalers. I messaged Mélissa and Alexandre, who are behind the website, and even though they wanted to see what’s up with other Montreal django developers, they couldn’t find anything serious. I hope then that MontrealPython becomes a central place for everything python in Montréal and look forward for their first meetup.

Last week, an employee of Sympatico, one of Canada’s main ISPs, confirmed on their online support forums that Bell has been using “state-of-the-art” technology since September to limit P2P downloads to 30kbps, regardless of the plan you subscribed too. The employee mentions that this was introduced to maintain their QoS. BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, WinMX are all recognised by their “solution” and throttled.

I am not sure if this is news for Montreal Tech Watch’s readers. In my neighborhood, which is well deserved (Internet via black fiber is avalaible for instance), I have concluded months ago that Bell is forging false TCP packets to reset the client connection and make P2P downloads sort of an adventure.

In the U.S., Comcast was just busted having the same business practices and may face a class action lawsuit.

While P2P may take up to 50% of the Internet traffic, it is also widely used for various usages, by independant video makers, for linux distributions; and is also used by new business applications like Skype, Lotus Notes or Tungle. It’s also naive to sell 5mbps plans and expect customers to just use email and some basic messenger chatting with that kind of connection.

via Ars Tecnica.

I like wikipedia’s definition of a barcamp:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

The definition focuses on openess and participation, and shows how a BarCamp is different from DemoCamps, StartupCamps or any other technology events.

I was coordinating the registration, welcoming attendees at the door by providing name tags, T-Shirts for those who registered on the wiki, and show them around the SAT. Compared to BarCampMontreal2, participants from Ottawa, Trois-Rivières, Toronto were expected, so we had to make sure everything went smooth.
Callum telling stories to Yan Levasseur

Arash Tchoupani, Denis Canuel, and Christopher Murtagh on the registration booth
Matt Forsythe and Erik Wright

Presentations were planned to start at only 10.00 am; so barcampers used to opportunity to network, blog or just take a coffee and a bagel.
Ian Rae, Jean Fahmy, and Daniel Drouet
Scott Annan blogging for Startup Ottawa
Evan Prodromou

Around 10 am, everyone gathered at the presentations area, where chairs were placed following a “U pattern”. Aleece Germano was our mc for the day, although Simon Law also had his fair share of the mic. Like RococoCamp, the program was shown on an Open Grid format, which means you could just announce at the last minute a Birds of a Feather session.

Hugh McGuire, Aleece Germano and Simon Law
Aleece Germano, Simon Law, and Callum

The first presentation was Hugh McGuire’s How Data can save the world. We had afterwards Avery Pennarun, who now hacks software for banks. It’s noteworthy that it was the only desktop software showcased at BarCamp, while everyone else had “web applications” on their lips. Next were the jetfire guys, who made a demo of their new scripting language. However, I didn’t get what was the true strength of their technology.
Laurent Maisonnave from ca.intruders.tv
Marc-Andre Cournoyer

Marc-André Cournoyer did a lightning talk about refactormycode, although like many other presenters, he had problems getting video out of his laptop.

We had then Dan Simard and Francois Lamontagne who presented TimmyOnTime, a project management tool. Instead of interacting via a web interface, users can just use their IM client. However, they had technical *cough* problems *cough* for their demo. It was unfortunate, since I know what they are doing with Ruby and javascript.
Dan Simard and Francois Lamontagne
Francois Lane

CakeMail was also officially launched at BarCamp. They had cakes for the audience, they also had Michelle Sullivan who was their PR manager, and came in with the whole team.

CakeMail sends, manages and studies email campaigns. Francois Lane presented CakeMail’s API and layered system, and did an interactive demo at the end, asking people who had laptops to participate. I also saw they perfected the used interface; which I’ll probably cover in a separate post.

Evan Prodromou presented next Kei.ki, a website with free books about parenting and children. Seems to me that Evan Prodromou wants to wikify the world and the information contained within it.

We had next lunch. I did a BOF for Blitzweekend, although it was in the middle of the SAT, which wasn’t very smart because of the noise.
Barcampers from Ottawa and Toronto
Duncan Moore and Veronique Boisjoly

Just after the lunch, we had Francois Pinard and then Louis-Philippe Huberdeau who did each lightning talks about LAMP and wiki translation.

We had next Sylvain Carle’s presentation about startupping in Montreal, raising funds, and why Montreal is a great place to launch a startup. Attendees cheered up when hearing about his conclusion.

Marc Laporte was next, he is in the main core of developers for TikiWiki, a powerful wiki and CMS solution. He insisted that TikiWiki had many features and can be used for pretty much anything you want.

Afterwards, Denis Canuel presented YulNews, a social news project where everyone can report news and become an editor. Ultra-focused topics can be created in YulNews: you can for instance create a channel news about your street; or news that really matter to you.

Denis Canuel is currently looking for beta-testers and more people for his project.
Marc Laporte, and Sylvain Carle about ninjas
Marc Laporte
Denis Canuel

Erik Wright and David Lemieux made a lightning talk about StickyCal, which can be used by bands to publish their calendards for fans. They don’t want to be a portal though, bands will insert a stickycal javascript line into their website and fans can rsvp quickly, with just their email.

Pierre Phaneuf was next, and talked about HTTP issues. http is often overlooked by web developers, and he presented how it can be used for caching and optimizing content delivery, by tweaking headers.
Denis Canuel and Aleece Germano
Erick Wright and David Lemieux from StickyCal
Pierre Phaneuf

Scott Annan, which I knew from his posts at StartupOttawa, presented next MercuryGrove, a solution for virtual teams.

We then had a lightning talk about coradiant, a web analytics software, which can produce very detailed reports about your website’s visitors and their behaviours. coradiant can also analyze files delivery and loading times.

Austin Hill made afterwards a session about angel investors in Canada, and especially on how to get funded.
Scott Annan with a blank screen
coradiant
Austin Hill from Akoha; he is also an angel investor.

Austin Hill has been on both sides of technology funding; he gave detailed, precise, and relevant advice, backed by years of experience. This was one of the rare moments where the room was silent and I could see that everyone was listening to his talk.

Robin Millette presented his map of territories in Québec who have access to high-speed internet. He used 411 to get a database of 30.000 businesses and pinged them to see if DSL service was possible. The project was started because he moved from Montréal to the countryside. A bright idea, I especially liked the graphics and how it’s possible to zoom in. Robin is looking now for a place to host his database.

The guys from BOK were there too. BOK is a voip startup for people who want to do overseas or interurban phone calls. They presented the service as an easy way to phone for free; although I think it’s still somehow clumsy to use their service.
Austin Hill
Robin Millette
Aydin Mirzaee
You can see pictures from the live Karaoke. Julie Lavoie seemed to have something against money, while Laurent Duperval had a lot of mojo. This was fun!

Simon Law, Hamish MacPherson, Julie Lavoie, Aleece Germano
Stephane Daury
Laurent Duperval

Félix Trépanier presented his notes from the Business of Software conference. I wished he also presented his own opinions about each speaker.

Bernd Haug presented next the Dirvish filesystem, which can be used to backup your filesystems on the network, which is very similar in principle to Leopard’s new feature, Time Machine.

We had next George Favvas, founder of smarthippo.com He said that while web2.0 is well known for the changes in media, music, travel etc, it hasn’t yet reached finance. SmartHippo allows its users to get the true information about mortgage companies, as the rates are posted by the community, going beyond teaser rates and marketing talk.

He had a fun video about how these companies withhold information and have different offers and products according to each customer.
Felix Trepanier
Bernd Haug who has steampunk art as a background picture
Morgan Tocker, Geroges Favvas

High resolution pictures are at flickr.com

After a week of beta-testing, Marc-André Cournouyer has launched Refactor My Code, a website to share Ruby, C# and Javascript code. It invites web developers to share publicly snippets of code in order to get feedback and improvements from other members. One year ago, there was rails.techno-weenie.net which did the same thing with a points system but Rick Olson moved it to a Beast forum and then killed off the service.

The beauty of Refactor my Code is that it’s simple in design but serves right a purpose in practice. It’s those kind of websites you think you could have came up with it yourself, but Marc-André finally nailed it. I am expecting it to become a reference for RoR developers, beyond Montreal. I have to say I am quite impressed and tempted to focus 100% on development (instead of mtw for instance).

This is a guest post from François Lamontagne, a Ruby web developer, or shall I say, a Ruby guru from Trois-Rivieres. There are some personal info about him in the first part, but the real deal is in the second part where he writes what are Ruby’s strengths

Hello Montreal Tech Watch readers!

Heri got in touch with me a few days ago and asked me if I would be interested to write an article on Montreal Tech Watch. I accepted right away!

Now I guess you wonder : Who’s that guy?

My name is François Lamontagne and I’m a 26 years old web developer living in Trois-Rivières. About 1 year ago, I came across a programming language that litteraly changed the way I look at programming in general : this language is ruby. If you’re a programmer, chances are you already heared about this language since it is the one behind the increasingly popular web framework : Ruby On Rails. I then realized something funny concerning ruby and ruby on rails : everyone seem to talk about it… but only a small percentage of people seem to use it… for real. In this article, my goal is to talk about the main advantages of ruby and why you should seriously consider using this language if you are a programmer. I will “try” not being too technical since I am aware that not every readers here are developers.

Ruby is not Rails

The first mistake people are doing is to confuse Ruby with Rails. Ruby is a high-level, general purpose programming language written in C (well, at least the official interpreter is written in C). It is a language interpreted, meaning that the instructions are parsed and executed at runtime. Most of the time, interpreted languages are slower but more flexible than compiled languages.

Rails is a web framework that was created to help developers build web applications easily and rapidly. To achieve this, a software architecture called MVC that existed long ago was crafted and inserted inside the framework to become its fondations. MVC stands for Model – View – Controller. It is a pattern (a way to develop an application) that force the developer to put his code into some predefined areas. The folks who created Rails decided to write the code of their framework in ruby… that’s why the framework is called Ruby On Rails. Someone could very well decide to rewrite the entire framework in PHP and call it PHP On Rails.

My blog : Ruby Fleebie

Ruby is one of these “new genre” programming languages that has a lot less constraints than other more traditional languages. I was so amazed by the beauty of the ruby syntax and by all of its possibilities that I decided to start my own blog (named Ruby Fleebie) in March 2007. Inside the blog, readers can expect informative and tutorial-like articles concerning the language concepts. I am learning Ruby everyday and the more I learn about it, the more I like it. I also learn a lot from the comments left by some very knowledgeable readers. Heck, I may be the one who write the articles, but it doesn’t mean I know more than everyone :)

I am pretty satisfied with the people reaction so far. There are about 650 readers subscribed to the RSS feed… not bad at all! Ruby Fleebie was also the main subject of an interview I gave to Peter Cooper, the maintainer of the reknown ruby blog : Ruby Inside. You can read the Interview here if you want. I hope I will enjoy maintaining Ruby Fleebie for a long time to come!

Why ruby rocks

Here is my personal reasons explaining why Ruby should not be missed by anyone :

#1 : Very expressive and readable syntax


3.times {puts "Ho! "} if person_speaking == :santa_claus


If you have some really basic experience in programming, chances are you understood the above instruction the first time you read it. Look how short this instruction is and how readable it remains. Note how there is no “looping construct” to write “Ho! ” 3 times. Instead, you just have to use a Ruby key concept called “code blocks” (have a look at this post if you want to know more about code blocks). Secondly, do you see where is the conditional operation? Yep! at the end of the instruction… and on the same line! Now read the instruction aloud and realize how readable it is. With some aesthetic changes, what you read is in fact : 3 times, puts ” Ho!” on the screen if the person speaking is Santa Claus. In another language, the above code could have look like this :


if (person_speaking == "santa claus") {
for (i=0; i<3;i++) {
print ("Ho! ");
}
}


Hmm… That certainly does the job, but I still prefer the Ruby way… not you?

#2 : Object oriented to the extreme

Unlike many other languages, we cannot just say that Ruby “is composed of” object oriented components. In Ruby, almost every single thing is an object. If you want to know more about that feature, I suggest that you read the following posts : 3 steps to understand how classes and objects work in ruby, Diving into ruby object model : Part 1, Diving into ruby object model : Part 2

#3 : Dynamic and open

In Ruby, a class is never “closed”. The developer can always reopen an already defined class to add a new method or a new attribute. Some “hardcore” developers don’t like that facet of Ruby because they feel it isn’t safe enough. What? That developer I don’t really trust can decide to reopen my class and remove/change my methods at runtime? That’s totally unacceptable! Well, that’s the price to pay for all the flexibility you have with Ruby. Ruby never tries to protect you from yourself nor does it tries to protect your code from other developers.

#4 : The “Ruby way”

Whatever the problem you are trying to solve, it seems that you can always do it “the ruby way”. You will know you did something “the ruby way” when you do it… it will smell ruby and feel ruby. Don’t worry however, doing something “the ruby way” absolutely doesn’t mean that there is only one single way to achieve something! You always have tons of possibilities… it’s just that some feel more ruby than others. I have started a new collection of posts on my blog that I called ” Rubyize this”. Readers have to change a (poorly written) code snippet into short and readable ruby. That is kind of fun actually.

There are tons of other reasons to try Ruby, but these 4 are the most important to me.

TimmyOnTime

I also want to talk about a project that I developed with Dan Simard, a web developer from Trois-Rivieres as well as a good friend of mine. The project is called TimmyOnTime. It is a time tracking tool based on instant messaging (Jabber, MSN or AIM). You write commands like “create project new website”, “start task build mockups”, etc and Timmy (the bot) will do the rest! We are extremely proud of what we’ve done. We have that amazing feeling of being the first to have done this kind of application. If you are curious and want to try it out, go here to get you started! I must warn you however that we are currently working on some stability issues with our robot… everything will return to the normal in the near future.

90% of TimmyOnTime has been developed with Ruby On Rails, the other 10% (the bot) was written in plain Ruby. TimmyOnTime is another proof that Ruby and Rails are not only buzz words, these are efficient technologies that work for real.

Thanks for your time and I hope to see you on Ruby Fleebie!

if you are interested in programming languages, you might also check out the article about Scheme/Lisp, featured one month ago on Montreal Tech Watch

Today, Montreal Tech Watch features a guest post from Dominique Boucher. This is a fairly technical post, and yet very informative. There is a great list of practical uses of Scheme/Lisp at the end of the post

Lisp/Scheme logo from Robby Findler

The Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group is four years old now and it’s alive and kicking. We can easily proclaim to be the most active Scheme user group worldwide. People come from as far as Boston, New York, Quebec, and Ottawa, to attend our meetings. And, most importantly, a startup culture is rising among its members. This can certainly be attributed to the growing interest in functional languages in general and in Erlang in particular, but also to Paul Graham’s
well-known articles.

Scheme/Lisp

So what is Lisp?

Lisp is not a single programming language, but rather a family of languages finding their roots in LISP, a programming language developed by John McCarthy at the MIT in the late 1950’s. (Yes, Lisp is almost 50 years old!) The two most popular languages in this family are Scheme and Common Lisp. Both languages have greatly influenced the design and implementation of many other programming languages.

Scheme is a more simple dialect of Lisp (its definition is only 50-pages long) , with an emphasis on simplicity and regularity. It is a full-fledged programming language, but it is also ideal as an extension language. It features powerful concepts like continuations, that can be used to implement all sorts of non-local complex control-flow constructs (efficient and lightweight threads, exceptions, logic programming, web programming, etc.).

Common Lisp, on the other hand, is a more complex language that is the result of the standardization of features found in various Lisp implementations in the late 1980’s. It has a powerful and sophisticated object system, CLOS, the only object system satisfying all the requirements of the OMG (the Object Management Group), the organization that controls the CORBA standard.

So what are the distinguishing features of Scheme and Common Lisp? First, the syntax. Or its lack of syntax. All programs are represented using a simple syntax for lists of data elements (Lisp which stands for LISt Processing), where all elements are separated by whitespaces and enclosed in parentheses:

(define (a-simple-program) (display “Hi!”) (newline))

This syntax may seem a little awkward at first, but it is in fact really convenient. And after a few days of programming, we don’t see them anymore, given that we use a good text editor that supports parentheses-matching. An advantage of this syntax is that it is easy to develop programs that manipulate other programs using macros.

Macros are program-transforming programs. (Lisp is often called a programmable programming language). A macro is different from the other definitions in your program in that it operates at compilation time instead of runtime, but using the same language as the rest of your program (no need for complex and limited pre-processors). Macros are used to augment the core language and implement domain-specific languages.

Also, Lisp encourages functional programming, i.e. programming with functions that do not mutate data. This style of programming leads to more robust and easily debuggable programs. Functional programs are more amenable to parallelization. Combined with a interactive style of development where functions are entered in the system interactively (instead of the usual edit-compile-link cycle), programs become easier to write and test.

What it is used for

Traditionally, Lisp has long been associated with Articifial Intelligence. But it is now used in virtually all industries. Common Lisp and Scheme are very good candidates for web and XML programming (some say that S-expressions, the syntax of Lisp programs, make a better XML). They are ideal languages for tackling hard problems, which often require an iterative, bottom-up design.

Scheme/Lisp in Montréal

Montréal is the home of some of the best open-source projects in the Scheme/Lisp community. Here are a few:

• Gambit-C is high-performance Scheme implementation that compiles to C. It has the best debugging system around. Also, its threading system can support millions of simultaneous lightweight threads. The author of Gambit-C is Marc Feeley, a professor and researcher at the Université de Montréal.
• Termite is a distribution and concurrency framework built on top of Gambit-C, inspired by the Erlang programming language. Termite is the work of Guillaume Germain, now working in the gaming industry.
• JazzScheme is a complete development platform for the production of high-end GUI-based applications, developed by Guillaume Cartier, a Montréal-based entrepreneur. JazzScheme has been used for the development of many industrial applications. It is currently being rewritten to run on top of Gambit-C.
• SchemeScript is a featureful Scheme plugin for the Eclipse platform developed by Dominique Boucher. It can be used to script Eclipse itself, or to interact with any Scheme system. It is now the defacto standard Scheme editor for Eclipse, as it provides the most advanced editing capabilities.

More importantly, Lisp programmers in Montréal are dedicated to using their tools in industrial contexts. As such, Lisp has been used with great success in various industries over the years: e-learning, telephony/call-centers, 3D, web, health-care, linguistics, workforce management, and many more. (Not all companies want to advertize their use of Lisp, seeing it as a secret weapon.)

For example, at Nü Echo, an exciting and fast-growing high-tech company developing speech-enabled applications for call-centers, Scheme has been used to develop the first generation of an innovative domain-specific language for the authoring of complex dialogs, as well as an unrivaled grammar development environment for speech applications that includes a sophisticated templating engine.

Other companies, like Metascoop, offer consulting services and custom application development in JazzScheme.