GitHub Rebase #28

Now that news from the move has slightly settled down, it’s Rebase time! As always, if you’ve got awesome projects you’d like featured, feel free to send me a message.

Featured Project

yaws is not just another web server. It’s Erlang powered, so you get massive concurrent capabilities right out of the box. It’s got some basic support for dynamic content and plenty of other commonly needed pieces of web functionality that you can see examples of on its home page. There’s also a few web frameworks that use yaws, including ErlyWeb, Erlang Web, and Nitrogen. Not convinced yet? Check out some recent blogs that benchmark yaws against Tornado, nginx, and even Apache. If you’re writing a web app that needs the power and speed of Erlang, be sure to look at yaws and its related frameworks first.

Notably New Projects

testswarm is John Resig of jQuery fame’s latest adventure in advancing the web. I first saw this demoed at Developer Day Boston and was completely blown away. It’s distributed testing for JavaScript, brought to the max. The server basically gives each client a test suite, and they report the status of the tests back for the given browser. You can then watch results flying back to the server in real time. This is a new kind of approach for dealing with browser testing on a grand scale, and it’s definitely worth a watch to see where it goes.

webstats is a Ruby-based web interface to monitoring your Linux web server’s health. Install the gem, run webstats, and you’re done. Currently, you can check out CPU usage, load average, memory usage, disk usage, and disk activity. This is a cheap way to implement monitoring if you’re concerned about it, and it even comes baked in with an email and Growl notifier if something goes haywire.

Visage is another great option in the Ruby world of server stats apps. Unlike the previous entry, this seems to be more of a long term look at server history, and even provides some neat Raphaël graphs of the collectd stats on your system. Check out this blog post for a litttle hint of what it offers, and give it a spin!

ClojureX is an easy way to install the Clojure programming language for OSX. Since it uses submodules that links to the languages’ repo here on GitHub, you can stay up to date with the latest features coming out if you want. It also comes with some editor scripts for both TextMate and emacs. There’s plenty of more info on this blog post.

oh-my-zsh is a collection of great helpers and scripts for your new shell, zsh. Out of the box, it’s now got auto completion for rake and capistrano, git branch names, theme support, and more. It’s also got an auto-updater too if you’re the type that doesn’t like to be bothered by such primitive tasks. If you’re still on bash or haven’t looked into other shells than your default yet, definitely give this a look.