A couple weeks ago I ran into some horrible issues with Oracle and activerecord-jdbc. Inserts were failing with an “invalid column index” error.

It turns out this was reported as JRUBY-2018 and resolved, but there wasn’t a release of activerecord-jdbc that contained the fix.

Being impatient like I am, I grabbed the head from svn and built it myself. So if you ever find you need to build yourself an activerecord-jdbc gem from subversion, here you go:

First make sure you have hoe installed.

jruby -S gem install hoe

Grab the source from svn.

svn co http://jruby-extras.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/activerecord-jdbc

Build the .gem

jruby -S rake package

Install the generated .gem file.

jruby -S gem install activerecord-jdbc-adapter-[version].gem

MAKE SURE YOU UNINSTALL YOUR PREVIOUS VERSION

The chances that you’ll have to do this are very slim. Nick Sieger is usually super-on-top of making sure things are up and working the way they should be, but just in case.

I’ve been really busy, so it’s taken some sweet time, but at long last I’ve been able to upgrade to SimpleLog 2.0 which Garrett Murray managed to push out the door. I redid all the colors, background, some of the fonts and the overall width of the content in my ongoing mantra to ‘mess with CSS’ more. The latest version also offers content and comment feeds, among other things, like a prettier admin interface.

DreamHost is continuing to aggravate me in new and special ways, none the least of which was deploying the new version of this site. I’ve got some space over at SliceHost that Nick has so nicely set up for us, but alas, I haven’t had the time or energy to get things moved over there yet.

I suppose deploying the new site isn’t a bad way to spend the afternoon after sampling a few pints with James at Pump Room Asia.

I’ve been meaning to comment as well about the relatively new and beautiful support for Ruby / Rails in both IntelliJ IDEA (screencasts here and here) and NetBeans (screencasts here and here, but I haven’t had time. It’ll have to wait for another day.

Don’t get me wrong, I love TextMate, but it ain’t no IDE.

Charles Oliver Nutter (AKA “one of the JRuby guys” if you listen to the JavaPosse podcast) put up a post that has me salivating about the deployment of Rails apps on Java app servers that will be a part of our inevitable future.

Currently, my biggest gripe about Rails is deployment. To put it bluntly, Lighttpd is unstable, and Mongrel has a few weird quirks, FastCGI is dated, buggy and well, not very fast.

So at any rate, the very idea of deploying a Rails app on a “real” application server is very cool.

I’ve never even looked at JRuby. Ever.

So I started to look at it yesterday, after I read somewhere that Spring 2.0 is going to have some built-in dynamic language support. Now, don’t get me wrong, I really like Spring. Six months ago you couldn’t catch me saying enough good things about Spring and how wonderful IoC / dependency injection makes life. But I want to say for the record, that whoever thought it was a “good idea” to allow people to embed JRuby / Groovy code in Bean Definition Files (see here) should probably be kicked in the teeth. And if that’s how I feel about it, then I don’t even want to know what Allen Holub would have to say.

Mind you, he probably doesn’t like Spring at all anyways, since it’s all based on XML configuration – but you have to draw the line somewhere.

Friends don’t let friends start embedding chunks of code from random languages into XML files.