…begins in wonder

I’ve been spending the last few days working with the AWS::S3 library.

Works well – we are streaming large audio files over it, so we needed something better than the ruby s3 bindings amazon released (though they are very clear in their code that they do not handle big files well).

Only hitch was setting metadata when creating an AWS::S3::S3Object – couldn’t get it to work.
Tried creating a 1 byte file to start, then updating with metadata, that was fine, but the initial create was erroring out, or the metadata would not take.

Luckily, there is a patch offered by ‘Lars’ which makes it all work for me now.

I posted this to the list, but here is some sample working code for setting metadata on create (once the patch is applied):

1) Using the store class method:

AWS::S3::S3Object.store(
'myfile-81805',
open('/data/production/amazon/myfolder/myfile-81805'),
'my-s3-bucket',
:content_type=>'audio/mpeg',
'x-amz-meta-my-file-name'=>'my.mp3')


2) Using the Bucket new_object method, and then store, you don’t have to include the metadata prefix ‘x-amz-meta-’:

my_bucket = AWS::S3::Bucket.find('my-s3-bucket')
s3o = my_bucket.new_object
s3o.key = 'myfile-81805'
s3o.value = open('/data/production/amazon/myfolder/myfile-81805')
s3o.content_type = 'audio/mpeg'
s3o.metadata['my-file-name'] = 'my.mp3'
s3o.store


So with that working, back to ActiveMessaging, and getting changes fully tested and checked in.

Jon Tirsen and friends created a great product, ActiveMessaging, to incorporate into Rails the ability to send and receive Stomp messages – specifically, this seems to mostly be used with ActiveMQ and its Stomp protocol support, and depends on the Ruby Stomp client courtesy Brian McCallister.

Since I am using a13g quite actively at prx, Jon has been kind enough to let me help maintain this product, and hopefully even add some to it. There is now a google code site, and a mailing list, thanks Jon.

First up are some bug fixes and quick enhancements – I sent a few in to Brian McCallister that will hopefully show up in a 1.0.3 release of the Ruby Stomp client. I also have a few fixes and minor enhancements to make to a13g that should show up soon, and I will also be working on any issues logged on the new google code site.

But what to do after that? I have some examples I want to throw out there for doing synchronous messaging between a rails and a java app, and I want to add even more documentation to the wiki so folks can get going with this easier – what else do people want? Get on the mailing list and let’s talk about it.

Playing around with FeedTools and FeedUpdater.
Fun stuff.

Had a few lessons learned I wanted to share:

1) load the rails app feed config file

To get FeedUpdater to find my ‘feed_updater.yml’ file, I had to make a small change to some of the file loading logic. It kept loading the example/default comfig – so I changed the list of paths to look for my file first, by climbing out of the vendor directory, and getting the file in the regular rails app config directory.

config_file = FileStalker.hunt([
"./feed_updater.yml",
"../config/feed_updater.yml"
])

to:

config_file = FileStalker.hunt([
"../../../config/feed_updater.yml",
"./feed_updater.yml",
"../config/feed_updater.yml"])


2) Use the rails app model objects in the custom updater script.

This took some experimentation to figure out.

As the rails wiki says, you need to require the environment script to be able to use the rails app goodies in a standalone script. But where, pray-tell, should you put this require?

Use the on_begin method of the custom script.
So if you have in your ‘feed_updater.yml’:

load_script: lib/my_feed_updater.rb

Then in this file, you need something like the following:

class MyFeedUpdater < FeedTools::FeedUpdater

on_complete do |updated_feed_hrefs|
end
end

Hope someone else gets some fun out of this.