Tokaido: My Hopes and Dreams

April 13th, 2012

A few weeks ago, I started a kickstarter project to fund work on a project to make a long-term, sustainable binary build of Ruby. The outpouring of support was great, and I have far exceeded my original funding goal. First, I’d like to thank everyone in the community who contributed large and small donations. This kickstarter couldn’t have been as successful as it has been without the hundreds (650 at latest count!) of individual donations by interested Rubyists.

In this post, I want to talk about what my goals are for this project, and why I think it will be a tool that everyone, myself included, will use.

What is Tokaido

The name “Tokaido” (東海道 in Japanese) comes from the Tōkaidō Shinkansen bullet train line in Japan.

Precompiled, Static Ruby

At its core, Tokaido is a binary distribution of Ruby without any external dependencies on your system. This means that Ruby itself, as well as all of the compiled elements of the standard library, will come in a self-contained directory with no additional requirements.

The binary will also have no hardcoded paths, so it will be possible to move the directory anywhere on the file system and have it continue to work as long as its bin directory is on the $PATH. This is an important goal, as Tokaido will ship as a downloadable .app which should work wherever it is dropped on the file system.

Precompiled Binary Gems

Tokaido will come with all of the necessary gems to use Rails and common Rails extensions. Because some of these gems have external dependencies (for example, nokogori depends on libxml2), Tokaido will come with precompiled versions of these gems built for OSX that do not depend on external libraries (they will be statically compiled, not dynamically linked).

As part of this project, I plan to work with people who ship common native extensions to help them build and ship binary versions of their gems for OSX without external dependencies. Luis Lavena has been doing amazing work with rake-compiler to make this process easy on gem developers, and Wayne E. Seguin and Michał Papis have been doing great work with sm, which makes it easy to precompile the needed dependencies for inclusion in the precompiled gems. These tools will be essential in the effort to make dependency-free precompiled gems a standard part of the OSX Ruby ecosystem.

I anticipate that gem authors will, in general, start distributing precompiled binary versions of their gems. If, by the time I ship the first version of Tokaido, some important gems do not yet ship as precompiled binaries, Tokaido will bootstrap the process by including the binaries.

Terminal-Based Workflow

Tokaido does not aim to replace the Terminal as the main way to work with a Rails app. It will ship an isolated environment with no external dependencies designed for use in the Terminal. The application UI will supplement, rather than replace, the normal application workflow. This is a crucial part of the overall goal to make Tokaido an excellent tool for both experienced Rails developers, intermediate Rails developers, and totally new Rails developers.

Because many gems come with executables, and Tokaido couldn’t abstract every possible executable even if it wanted to, it is essential that new developers get used to using the Terminal as early as possible in their Rails experience, but in a way that minimizes unnecessary errors.

Extras: Code and App Health

A number of really great tools exist to help Rails applications remain healthy:

• bundle outdated lets you know when new versions of gems are available
• rails_best_practices helps find common mistakes in Rails applications
• reek, flog, flay, roodi and other metrics tools help identify Ruby smells and prioritizes areas where you can reduce your technical debt
• simplecov does coverage analysis on your test suite to identify areas lacking good coverage
• bullet identifies N+1 queries and unused eager loading
• ActiveSupport::Notifications provides introspection information about Rails applications

The Tokaido UI will attempt to centralize this useful information into a health check, and help you drill in if you want to do more with the information. Because they are so useful, it will encourage you to use these tools in new application, and provide immediate rewards if you do.

Extras: yourapp.dev

The pow dev server and PassengerPane make it possible to avoid needing to manually load a Rails server and gives you a friendly alias for your application at yourapp.dev instead of having to type in a port on localhost.

Tokaido will come with integrated support for this, so every app you manage through Tokaido will have a aliased development server out of the box.

Extras: rails:// (or ruby://) Protocol Handler

Tokaido will come with a protocol handler that will allow .gem files hosted on rubygems.org or other locations to be added to an app managed by Tokaido. It may also allow web sites to host installation templates that could execute against a maintained application. This will require coordination with rubygems.org, and the specifics of it may change over time, but the basic idea is to enable communication between web sites and the Tokaido app.

This idea came from a number of community members, and the specifics (especially around security and the protocol specification) definitely need fleshing out, but it seems extremely promising.

Extras: Ruby Toolbox Integration?

Ruby Toolbox has emerged as an amazing directory of Ruby libraries, categorized by type. It also has up-to-date information on Github activity and other useful indicators when evaluating tools. Several people have asked for integration with Ruby Toolbox, and assuming the author is willing, Tokaido will make it easy to use the information in Ruby Toolbox to bootstrap an app and add new functionality as your app grows.

Finding the right gem for the job is easy if you know what you’re looking for, but even experienced developers find the Ruby Toolbox useful when researching tools in an unfamiliar area.

Goals of Tokaido

Eliminate Failure Scenarios

The primary goal of Tokaido is to build a distribution of Ruby that eliminates the main failure scenarios that people encounter when trying to install Ruby. In general, things fail because of conflicts with the existing system environment (or the user’s environment). These failures do not happen to everyone, but when they happen, they are extremely difficult to recover from. This has happened to me personally and to people I have tried to get started with Ruby.

This sort of thing does not necessarily happen on every installation, but once you start going down the rabbit hole, it can be very difficult to find your way out. The environment difficulties can be caused by anything from an old MacPorts installation to a mistaken attempt to install something to the system once upon a time to something failing during a previous step in the installation process.

It also may not be enough to install a precompiled Ruby into the system, because the system environment itself may be corrupted with things like erroneous executables on the $PATH or bad dynamic libraries that get linked during native compilation. Also, later installations may do damage to the system-installed Ruby. Tokaido is a standalone environment that is loaded on top of an existing session, and therefore minimizes the possible damage that load order or subsequent installs can do.

Precompile Everything

In order to eliminate a certain class of failure scenarios, Tokaido will ship with a precompiled Ruby, which will eliminate the possibility of compilation errors when installing Ruby. This precompiled Ruby will also come with all of the dependencies it needs, like zlib, yaml and others, instead of allowing the system to try to find them at runtime. This will eliminate the possibility that changes to the system environment will cause a normally working version of Ruby to fail in some scenarios.

As above, Tokaido will also use this technique for commonly used native gems. For example, Tokaido will ship with a precompiled version of Nokogiri that comes with libxml, instead of relying on the system’s copy of libxml (incidentally, the system’s libxml has occasionally been subtly broken, necessitating installation via homebrew). I expect that this will happen because gem authors will start shipping precompiled versions of their gems for OSX. If there are still a few common gems straggling by the time Tokaido ships, we’ll bootstrap the process by shipping with binary gems we compile ourselves.

Use Tokaido Myself

Since Tokaido does not fundamentally alter a developer’s relationship with Ruby, I expect to be able to start using it for day-to-day Rails development. Some of the additional extras, like app health and built-in server support, are things I already do manually and will enjoy having as part of a larger tool. I’m also extremely interested in ideas for other extras that can add value for experienced developers without altering how people work with Ruby today.

Integration Testing

One of the coolest, unheralded things about the Rails project is the integration suite for Rails put together by Sam Ruby. It essentially transcribes the Agile Web Development With Rails book into a series of very complete integration tests for Rails. When refactoring Rails for Rails 3, this suite was extremely useful, and helped keep the number of unintentional changes to Rails to a tiny number. It also kept us honest about intentional changes.

This suite is perfect for Tokaido, as it tests every aspect of Rails, which is itself touches a wide swath of Ruby itself. To start, Tokaido will use this suite for integration testing.

Collaboration

There are several other projects, notably rvm, trying to solve problems in a similar space. Especially when it comes to precompilation, there is no reason not to work together on the core infrastructure that powers these efforts. I have already started to work with Michał Papis, who also works on sm and rvm on shared work that can be useful for both projects. He has been teaching me all about the work that folks associated with rvm have done to simplify things like downloading and compiling libz.a, a prerequisite for precompiled Rubies.

I will also work with authors of native gems to start shipping precompiled binary gems for OSX. I have already started working with Aaron Patterson, who works on the sqlite and nokogiri gems, and have started reaching out to several others.

I am very interested in working together with anyone working on a similar area so that the tools we are all working on can be shared between projects. This is a core mission of the Tokaido project, and something that the extra funding I got will allow me to prioritize.

Migration to “System”

Also through Michał Papis, I learned about an awesome new (still experimental) feature in rvm called mount that will mount an external Ruby into the rvm system. I will make sure that the Tokaido ruby can be added to an rvm installation. This will mean that if someone wants to migrate from Tokaido to a more advanced rvm setup, they can take their Ruby environment with them with no trouble.

I would be open to other approaches to migrating a Tokaido environment to the system as well. The goal would be to seamlessly migrate an environment to the system without introducing opportunities for failure during that process.

Looking Forward

I’m really excited to the work I’ve been doing to prepare for this project, and looking forward to shipping a great environment for OSX Ruby users. I have also really enjoyed reaching out to others working in similar areas and the prospect of collaborating with so many smart people on a shared goal.

Thanks so much!

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JavaScript Needs Blocks

January 10th, 2012

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby’s blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript’s “first class functions”. Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both JavaScript and Ruby have a mechanism to do so makes it natural to assume equivalence.

In fact, when people talk about why Ruby’s blocks are different from Python‘s functions, they usually talk about anonymity, something that Ruby and JavaScript share, but Python does not have. At first glance, a Ruby block is an “anonymous function” (or colloquially, a “closure”) just as a JavaScript function is one.

This impression, which I admittedly shared in my early days as a Ruby/JavaScript developer, misses an important subtlety that turns out to have large implications. This subtlety is often referred to as “Tennent’s Correspondence Principle”. In short, Tennent’s Correspondence Principle says:

“For a given expression expr, lambda expr should be equivalent.”

This is also known as the principle of abstraction, because it means that it is easy to refactor common code into methods that take a block. For instance, consider the common case of file resource management. Imagine that the block form of File.open didn’t exist in Ruby, and you saw a lot of the following in your code:

begin
  f = File.open(filename, "r")
  # do something with f
ensure
  f.close
end

In general, when you see some code that has the same beginning and end, but a different middle, it is natural to refactor it into a method that takes a block. You would write a method like this:

def read_file(filename)
  f = File.open(filename, "r")
  yield f
ensure
  f.close
end

And you’d refactor instances of the pattern in your code with:

read_file(filename) do |f|
  # do something with f
end

In order for this strategy to work, it’s important that the code inside the block look the same after refactoring as before. We can restate the correspondence principle in this case as:

# do something with f

should be equivalent to:

do
  # do something with
end

At first glance, it looks like this is true in Ruby and JavaScript. For instance, let’s say that what you’re doing with the file is printing its mtime. You can easily refactor the equivalent in JavaScript:

try {
  // imaginary JS file API
  var f = File.open(filename, "r");
  sys.print(f.mtime);
} finally {
  f.close();
}

Into this:

read_file(function(f) {
  sys.print(f.mtime);
});

In fact, cases like this, which are in fact quite elegant, give people the mistaken impression that Ruby and JavaScript have a roughly equivalent ability to refactor common functionality into anonymous functions.

However, consider a slightly more complicated example, first in Ruby. We’ll write a simple class that calculates a File’s mtime and retrieves its body:

class FileInfo
  def initialize(filename)
    @name = filename
  end
 
  # calculate the File's +mtime+
  def mtime
    f = File.open(@name, "r")
    mtime = mtime_for(f)
    return "too old" if mtime < (Time.now - 1000)
    puts "recent!"
    mtime
  ensure
    f.close
  end
 
  # retrieve that file's +body+
  def body
    f = File.open(@name, "r")
    f.read
  ensure
    f.close
  end
 
  # a helper method to retrieve the mtime of a file
  def mtime_for(f)
    File.mtime(f)
  end
end

We can easily refactor this code using blocks:

class FileInfo
  def initialize(filename)
    @name = filename
  end
 
  # refactor the common file management code into a method
  # that takes a block
  def mtime
    with_file do |f|
      mtime = mtime_for(f)
      return "too old" if mtime < (Time.now - 1000)
      puts "recent!"
      mtime
    end
  end
 
  def body
    with_file { |f| f.read }
  end
 
  def mtime_for(f)
    File.mtime(f)
  end
 
private
  # this method opens a file, calls a block with it, and
  # ensures that the file is closed once the block has
  # finished executing.
  def with_file
    f = File.open(@name, "r")
    yield f
  ensure
    f.close
  end
end

Again, the important thing to note here is that we could move the code into a block without changing it. Unfortunately, this same case does not work in JavaScript. Let’s first write the equivalent FileInfo class in JavaScript.

// constructor for the FileInfo class
FileInfo = function(filename) {
  this.name = filename;
};
 
FileInfo.prototype = {
  // retrieve the file's mtime
  mtime: function() {
    try {
      var f = File.open(this.name, "r");
      var mtime = this.mtimeFor(f);
      if (mtime < new Date() - 1000) {
        return "too old";
      }
      sys.print(mtime);
    } finally {
      f.close();
    }
  },
 
  // retrieve the file's body
  body: function() {
    try {
      var f = File.open(this.name, "r");
      return f.read();
    } finally {
      f.close();
    }
  },
 
  // a helper method to retrieve the mtime of a file
  mtimeFor: function(f) {
    return File.mtime(f);
  }
};

If we try to convert the repeated code into a method that takes a function, the mtime method will look something like:

function() {
  // refactor the common file management code into a method
  // that takes a block
  this.withFile(function(f) {
    var mtime = this.mtimeFor(f);
    if (mtime < new Date() - 1000) {
      return "too old";
    }
    sys.print(mtime);
  });
}

There are two very common problems here. First, this has changed contexts. We can fix this by allowing a binding as a second parameter, but it means that we need to make sure that every time we refactor to a lambda we make sure to accept a binding parameter and pass it in. The var self = this pattern emerged in JavaScript primarily because of the lack of correspondence.

This is annoying, but not deadly. More problematic is the fact that return has changed meaning. Instead of returning from the outer function, it returns from the inner one.

This is the right time for JavaScript lovers (and I write this as a sometimes JavaScript lover myself) to argue that return behaves exactly as intended, and this behavior is simpler and more elegant than the Ruby behavior. That may be true, but it doesn’t alter the fact that this behavior breaks the correspondence principle, with very real consequences.

Instead of effortlessly refactoring code with the same start and end into a function taking a function, JavaScript library authors need to consider the fact that consumers of their APIs will often need to perform some gymnastics when dealing with nested functions. In my experience as an author and consumer of JavaScript libraries, this leads to many cases where it’s just too much bother to provide a nice block-based API.

In order to have a language with return (and possibly super and other similar keywords) that satisfies the correspondence principle, the language must, like Ruby and Smalltalk before it, have a function lambda and a block lambda. Keywords like return always return from the function lambda, even inside of block lambdas nested inside. At first glance, this appears a bit inelegant, and language partisans often accuse Ruby of unnecessarily having two types of “callables”, in my experience as an author of large libraries in both Ruby and JavaScript, it results in more elegant abstractions in the end.

Iterators and Callbacks

It’s worth noting that block lambdas only make sense for functions that take functions and invoke them immediately. In this context, keywords like return, super and Ruby’s yield make sense. These cases include iterators, mutex synchronization and resource management (like the block form of File.open).

In contrast, when functions are used as callbacks, those keywords no longer make sense. What does it mean to return from a function that has already returned? In these cases, typically involving callbacks, function lambdas make a lot of sense. In my view, this explains why JavaScript feels so elegant for evented code that involves a lot of callbacks, but somewhat clunky for the iterator case, and Ruby feels so elegant for the iterator case and somewhat more clunky for the evented case. In Ruby’s case, (again in my opinion), this clunkiness is more from the massively pervasive use of blocks for synchronous code than a real deficiency in its structures.

Because of these concerns, the ECMA working group responsible for ECMAScript, TC39, is considering adding block lambdas to the language. This would mean that the above example could be refactored to:

FileInfo = function(name) {
  this.name = name;
};
 
FileInfo.prototype = {
  mtime: function() {
    // use the proposed block syntax, `{ |args| }`.
    this.withFile { |f|
      // in block lambdas, +this+ is unchanged
      var mtime = this.mtimeFor(f);
      if (mtime < new Date() - 1000) {
        // block lambdas return from their nearest function
        return "too old";
      }
      sys.print(mtime);
    }
  },
 
  body: function() {
    this.withFile { |f| f.read(); }
  },
 
  mtimeFor: function(f) {
    return File.mtime(f);
  },
 
  withFile: function(block) {
    try {
      var f = File.open(this.name, "r");
      block(f);
    } finally {
      f.close();
    }
  }
};

Note that a parallel proposal, which replaces function-scoped var with block-scoped let, will almost certainly be accepted by TC39, which would slightly, but not substantively, change this example. Also note block lambdas automatically return their last statement.

Our experience with Smalltalk and Ruby show that people do not need to understand the SCARY correspondence principle for a language that satisfies it to yield the desired results. I love the fact that the concept of “iterator” is not built into the language, but is instead a consequence of natural block semantics. This gives Ruby a rich, broadly useful set of built-in iterators, and language users commonly build custom ones. As a JavaScript practitioner, I often run into situations where using a for loop is significantly more straight-forward than using forEach, always because of the lack of correspondence between the code inside a built-in for loop and the code inside the function passed to forEach.

For the reasons described above, I strongly approve of the block lambda proposal and hope it is adopted.

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Amber.js (formerly SproutCore 2.0) is now Ember.js

December 12th, 2011

After we announced Amber.js last week, a number of people brought Amber Smalltalk, a Smalltalk implementation written in JavaScript, to our attention. After some communication with the folks behind Amber Smalltalk, we started a discussion on Hacker News about what we should do.

Most people told us to stick with Amber.js, but a sizable minority told us to come up with a different name. After thinking about it, we didn’t feel good about the conflict and decided to choose a new name.

Henceforth, the project formerly known as SproutCore 2.0 will be known as Ember.js. Our new website is up at http://www.emberjs.com

(and yes, we know this is pretty ridiculous)

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Announcing Amber.js

December 8th, 2011

A little over a year ago, I got my first serious glimpse at SproutCore, the JavaScript framework Apple used to build MobileMe (now iCloud). At the time, I had worked extensively with jQuery and Rails on client-side projects, and I had never found the arguments for the “solutions for big apps” very compelling. At the time, most of the arguments (at least within the jQuery community) focused on bringing more object orientation to JavaScript, but I never felt that they offered the layers of abstraction you really want to manage complexity.

When I first started to play with SproutCore, I realized that the bindings and computed properties were what gave it its real power. Bindings and computed properties provide a clean mechanism for building the layers of abstractions that improve the structure of large applications.

But even before I got involved in SproutCore, I had an epiphany one day when playing with Mustache.js. Because Mustache.js was a declarative way of describing a translation from a piece of JSON to HTML, it seemed to me that there was enough information in the template to also update the template when the underlying data changed. Unfortunately, Mustache.js itself lacked the power to implement this idea, and I was still lacking a robust enough observer library.

Not wanting to build an observer library in isolation (and believing that jQuery’s data support would work in a pinch), I started working on the first problem: building a template engine powerful enough to build automatically updating templates. The kernel of the idea for Handlebars (helpers and block helpers as the core primitives) came out of a discussion with Carl Lerche back when we were still at Engine Yard, and I got to work.

When I met SproutCore, I realized that it provided a more powerful observer library than anything I was considering at the time for the data-binding aspect of Handlebars, and that SproutCore’s biggest weakness was the lack of a good templating solution in its view layer. I also rapidly became convinced that bindings and computed properties were a significantly better abstraction, and allowed for hiding much more complexity, than manually binding observers.

After some months of retooling SproutCore with Tom Dale to take advantage of an auto-updating templating solution that fit cleanly into SproutCore’s binding model, we reached a crossroads. SproutCore itself was built from the ground up to provide a desktop-like experience on desktop browsers, and our ultimate plan had started to diverge from the widget-centric focus of many existing users of SproutCore. After a lot of soul-searching, we decided to start from scratch with SproutCore 2.0, taking with us the best, core ideas of SproutCore, but leaving the large, somewhat sprawling codebase behind.

Since early this year, we have worked with several large companies, including ZenDesk, BazaarVoice and LivingSocial, to iterate on the core ideas that we started from to build a powerful framework for building ambitious applications.

Throughout this time, though, we became increasingly convinced that calling what we were building “SproutCore 2.0″ was causing a lot of confusion, because SproutCore 1.x was primarily a native-style widget library, while SproutCore 2.0 was a framework for building web-based applications using HTML and CSS for the presentation layer. This lack of overlap causes serious confusion in the IRC room, mailing list, blog, when searching on Google, etc.

To clear things up, we have decided to name the SproutCore-inspired framework we have been building (so far called “SproutCore 2.0″) “Amber.js”. Amber brings a proven MVC architecture to web applications, as well as features that eliminate common boilerplate. If you played with SproutCore and liked the concepts but felt like it was too heavy, give Amber a try. And if you’re a Backbone fan, I think you’ll love how little code you need to write with Amber.

In the next few days, we’ll be launching a new website with examples, documentation, and download links. Stay tuned for further updates soon.

UPDATE: The code for Amber.js is still, as of December 8, hosted at the SproutCore organization. It will be moved and re-namespaced within a few days.

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