Anyone here worked with ANTLR (or Lex, Yacc, Flex, Bison whatever)? I'll be playing around with it for a bit during the next two weeks or so. Already dreading the JAVA but them's the breaks.

Also on the off chance that anyone has done any Eclipse plugin? development I'd be thankful for any getting started advice.

Basically what I want to do is develop a silly language using ANTLR and write an Eclipse plugin so I get an editor with some basic goodies and a nice "COMPILE GOGOGO" button :P

Googling this is a tad hard because it brings up the ANTL plugin for Eclipse and not how to write an Eclipse plugin.

[I have 0 Eclipse experience. It's pretty confusing and overly powerful it seems. Is there some basic "write an editor for your language" hello world thing]

Seems kinda scummy to try and keep a free tier heroku/aws server active through scripts or some third party site.

I'm pretty sure if they had a problem with it they'd stop it since the amount of effort to detect a continuos ping is extremely small.

If speed was a critical issue, I'd probably ping it, but it doesn't bother me really. Whether or not it is dishonest, Heroku is dealing with developers and surely they know this exploit and if they cared, they'd probably stop it.


Actually, if speed was an issue, I'd probably be earning enough that spinning an extra dyno wouldn't bother me.

Not to mention that people that care enough about their site's responsiveness and uptime are exactly the people heroku wants as customers.

The idling is almost certainly there mainly so that stupid one-off apps don't use up a bunch of resources.

I think they have tried to stop it to some extent, but it's probably not hugely worth their time. Not a big deal, probably an overstatement on my part.

Heroku is awesome, but super expensive.

I couldn't find anything about them trying to stop it (although right now I can't access the heroku blog) and I've never heard of them trying.

We'd probably reconsider our approach if they asked people not to do it.

I was using Heroku at one point, but on the free tier, the Dynos keep going to sleep and so the site constantly had a 2-3 second lag while a dyno span up again. I ended up moving to AppFog... its not as feature rich as Heroku, but I have had MUCH less trouble with it.

Is there a good comparison article or site on the big players in PaaS?

Don't understand why people don't just buy hosting. $60 a year, you own everything, wordpress installs, unlimited sites, your domain looks professional etc.

It completely depends what your needs are. For about 3 years, I hosted my own cloud servers on AWS. It gave me unlimited flexibility to do what I wanted. If I decided to install a different DB, app, version of software, it was easy to do as I was in complete control. The downside however is that I spend a LOT of time running backups, restoring servers, keeping software up to date, patching OSs. Moving to a PAAS has worked out slightly more expensive, and I am limited to the software installed on the platform, but in terms of server maintenance, it saves me a huge amount of work.

TCL Easter Egg:

The entire world doesn't use Wordpress. If I wanted to pay for hosting, I'd be paying at least $250 per year for a VPN.

It doesn't hurt to learn a bit about this stuff. If you hit the front page of hacker news or get a strong response on reddit, you'll want a host that won't throttle you while your site gets 10k hits per hour.

After a certain point of popularity, the host, despite being unlimited, will ask that you move up to VPN.

I want to use a (pc) headset that has 3.5mm male ends for audio and mic on a new Polycom vxx 500 by connecting it to this usb adapter: http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-3-5mm...s=3.5mm+to+usb

That sounds like it will 100% work, right?

Have any of you guys setup rails 4.0 on a $5-10/month VPS? If so what's your response times / requests per minute with a typical site that might have a few resources doing fairly uncomplicated things (not too difficult queries but typical things you would see in a content oriented site) but has some user interaction?

I have nothing to do this weekend so I planned to learn a bit of ruby and go through that end-to-end rails tutorial. Have a project coming up that just seems like it would be ******ed to do in Node (fairly large content oriented site). I thought about implementing my own "CMS but for developers which exposes an easy to use interface for content editors" but then I thought I will be inventing so much crap that already exists in rails that I might as well just try rails.

Never looked into rails prior to today but I stumbled upon a rails 4 presentation the other day and I have to say it looked really promising. Having that much fine tuning with cache and being able to implement it almost effortlessly seems like such a big win that I would be willing to put in a lot of time to become familiar with rails.

Might be worth using the Heroku free dyno for this. They support Rails 4 https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails4 and you should get very good performance.

Unless of course you are looking to run your own server, in which case, $5-10 per month is not likely to get you much. Your best bet is probably the AWS free tier which will give you 512MB.

$5-10/month usually gets you about a gig of ram and a few TBs of bandwidth. HD depends on the host, 30 gig SSD or about 150 gigs seems about the standard in that range.

I'm not sure how much resources rails will take up yet. I'll keep AWS in mind but lately I've been hearing that if you break out of the free plan AWS tends to be cost inefficient unless you expect so much traffic that you would need more than a few servers?

S3 is always a good idea though.

Where do you get a gig of ram from for $5-$10 a month? Never come across a VPS which offers ram at that price.

Mind sharing the rails tutorial you came across?

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing is the one with the SSD.

@splash,
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapte...up?version=4.0

It's been updated for rails 4 too which is nice I guess. I'm a few chapters deep and it's pretty well written and haven't hit any road blocks. There was one point during installation that hung me up for a few minutes though.

If you get stuck and can't "bundle update" or "bundle install" then run this:

@Shoe,

Having done this myself, I think that learning ruby and rails together is a bad idea. Ruby seems simple but has a lot of (very well managed) complexity to learn. More important, having some idea of your philosophy and tastes, I highly recommend that you avoid rails. If you stay away from jquery because of bloat, know that rails is 100x worse. I ended up moving to sinatra, which I think you would like much better too. You'll have much more control and won't be dependent on nearly as magic -- it's easier to understand what actually happens with each request from end to end. All the non-core functionality will be through specific gems that you install for the purpose at hand. Or if you really want to do it the home spun hacker way, learn how to write a rack app by hand.

I would just use Express with Node instead of Sinatra if it came down to that because they both share a very similar philosophy/workflow. I'm really familiar with Express' request/response cycle and what happens at each step.

The problem is I'm in charge of making a site that requires the following:

- It will be shipped to clients who have in house developers with unknown backgrounds
- It needs to be extensible by developers in a maintainable way
- It needs to expose a front end where content creators can edit the data models that the developers setup
- There will be an unknown amount of data models with various relationships (think CMS)

Word press is too complicated for content creators and it's too restrictive unless you really know WP in depth which I don't. The main reason is the admin interface for editors sucks though.

I could pull this off with Express but it will involve setting up so much code that I would end up recreating something like rails in the end anyways. I would end up creating an entire work flow that would lock you into my opinions instead of rail's so what's the difference?

Also with the way rails handles caching now with the combination of pjax I think it would be possible for it to out perform pretty much anything for most sites. You can't really beat serving precompiled views from memory and I know for sure I'm not smart enough to implement that type of cache integration with Express/Node and if you did you would have to impose tons of opinions because the only way something like that works is when you have guarantees that something else exists down the chain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAiVsbXVP6k

@Shoe,

Trying to learn ruby + rails in a weekend to build a large complicated site like that seems like a disaster to me. ymmv (i hope).

Reported for Happy Birthday copyright infringement.