Simon Willison’s Weblog

What’s New in Ruby on Rails 8 (via)

Rails 8 takes SQLite from a lightweight development tool to a reliable choice for production use, thanks to extensive work on the SQLite adapter and Ruby driver.

With the introduction of the solid adapters discussed above, SQLite now has the capability to power Action Cable, Rails.cache, and Active Job effectively, expanding its role beyond just prototyping or testing environments. [...]

• Transactions default to IMMEDIATE mode to improve concurrency.

Also included in Rails 8: Kamal, a new automated deployment system by 37signals for self-hosting web applications on hardware or virtual servers:

Kamal basically is Capistrano for Containers, without the need to carefully prepare servers in advance. No need to ensure that the servers have just the right version of Ruby or other dependencies you need. That all lives in the Docker image now. You can boot a brand new Ubuntu (or whatever) server, add it to the list of servers in Kamal, and it’ll be auto-provisioned with Docker, and run right away.

More from the official blog post about the release:

At 37signals, we're building a growing suite of apps that use SQLite in production with ONCE. There are now thousands of installations of both Campfire and Writebook running in the wild that all run SQLite. This has meant a lot of real-world pressure on ensuring that Rails (and Ruby) is working that wonderful file-based database as well as it can be. Through proper defaults like WAL and IMMEDIATE mode. Special thanks to Stephen Margheim for a slew of such improvements and Mike Dalessio for solving a last-minute SQLite file corruption issue in the Ruby driver.

# 7th October 2024, 7:17 pm / 37-signals, rails, ruby, sqlite, docker

MRSK. A new open source web application deployment tool from 37signals, developed to help migrate their Hey webmail app out of the cloud and onto their own managed hardware. The key feature is one that I care about deeply: it enables zero-downtime deploys by running all traffic through a Traefik reverse proxy in a way that allows requests to be paused while a new deployment is going out—so end users get a few seconds delay on their HTTP requests before being served by the replaced application.

# 29th April 2023, 11:54 pm / 37-signals, deployment, ops, zero-downtime, traefik

37signals Product Blog: We’ll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1. The support costs far outweighed the benefits to customers, especially now that 37signals have their own single sign in mechanism that works across all of their products.

# 25th January 2011, 4:17 pm / 37-signals, openid, recovered

Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008. Interesting move considering BaseCamp is used for communicating with (often corporate) clients. It would be nice to see the browser stats behind the decision.

# 4th July 2008, 9:17 am / 37-signals, basecamp, browsersupport, ie6

BUG: XSS Security flaw in BaseCamp Messages (via) BaseCamp lets users include HTML and JavaScript in messages, on the basis that anyone with a BaseCamp account is a trusted party. I’m not convinced: you could use this to circumvent BaseCamp’s access control stuff and read messages you’re not meant to. On the flip side, you could also use this to add brand new features to BaseCamp by using JavaScript in a message as a server-side equivalent to Greasemonkey.

# 26th June 2008, 9:39 am / 37-signals, basecamp, greasemonkey, javascript, security, xss

How not to apply for a job. Quite reasonably, 37signals care if job applicants get their wordmark right. Having worked for Yahoo! I know how important that ! is. What really winds me up is companies that aren’t consistent with name capitalisation across their own sites—many startups are guilty of this.

# 17th June 2008, 8:22 am / 37-signals, jobs, spelling, wordmark, yahoo

OpenID support in Blinksale (via) Blinksale + Highrise + Basecamp means you can run your small business on OpenID.

# 10th July 2007, 7:45 am / 37-signals, basecamp, blinksale, chris-messina, highrise, openid

OpenID: Why, how, 37signals. 37signals just enabled OpenID on Basecamp as well as Highrise. This is their excellent attempt at explaining its benefits.

# 28th June 2007, 1:38 am / 37-signals, basecamp, highrise, openid

Highrise: Early stats, Cases for all, the new Solo plan, and more disk space! 9% of signups came in through OpenID, and they’ve opened up cases to everyone fixing my number one complaint about the service. Great job!

# 23rd March 2007, 1:44 am / 37-signals, highise, openid

Highrise. The new online contact manager from 37signals—exactly the tool I need for managing my freelancing, and it even accepts OpenID.

# 19th March 2007, 10:39 pm / 37-signals, highrise, openid

37 Signals’ next app Highrise will support OpenID. I can’t wait to see how the 37 Signals team deal with the UI challenges involved in supporting OpenID logins.

# 7th March 2007, 9:23 am / 37-signals, highrise, openid

punupgeek.com on Active Resource. Looks like 37 signals might be looking in to scaling across multiple servers using web services.

# 26th June 2006, 11:12 am / 37-signals, activeresource, rails, scaling