Information on Mark Watson's Book "Scripting Intelligence: Web 3.0 Information, Gathering and Processing"

Please check the APress web site for code downloads, errata, etc.

APress web page for my book that also contains the code download link.

February 2012: I put the example source code and data in a github repo.

General notes on Ruby 1.8.x vs. Ruby 1.9.x vs. JRuby compatibility:

I have used Ruby 1.9.1 for much of my development since January 2009. Ruby 1.9.x does not require "require 'rubygems'" before requiring locally installed gem libraries. If you are using Ruby 1.8.x, and if any of my example programs fail to load gems that you have installed, then I probably did not put a "require 'rubygems'" at the top of the example source file - so, please add this statement and try re-running the example.

Corrections and comments on book material:

3/31/2012: Running the Mashup Rails (Google Maps and Twitter) web app

Expect a lot of problems getting this 4 year old example running.

Your best bet getting this old example web app running is to stick with the old version of Rails (2.3.2) that I used to write it and use Ruby 1.8.7. The example code is not compatible with Ruby 1.9.x. If you want to use JRuby that is also possible but you might want to switch the database to MySQL or PostgreSQL to avoid the hassles of getting SQLite3 working with JRuby.

You will have to either find an old version of the Twitter gem or change the Ruby code in the MashupController class. The new Twitter gem uses OAuth, which is good, but breaks the APIs that I used almost 4 years ago when I wrote this example web application.

I believe that the Google Maps APIs have also been changed.

3/30/2012: Using the AMI

The same reader who reported problems on 2/24/2012 with the AMI is now having problems with the Ruby setup on the AMI, specifically, it looks like he did a "gem install rails" and is now running into a Rails 2.x vs. Rails 3.x compatibility issue.

I recommend that readers stop using the AMI and instead just get the latest version of the example source code and data files from the github repo for the book examples. I had originally setup the Amazon AMI to save readers some time, but it is now apparently out of date. When you use the Rails examples, don't try to use the latest versions of Rails. I used version 2.3.2 of Rails while writing this book.

2/24/2012: Using the AMI

A reader mentioned that using the AMI to start an EC2 instance with the default security settings didn't work; he reported: "After more trials and errors, I finally am able to connect to the AMI now. I was not able to connect because of the security setting when setting up the AMI instance. The Amazon has three security settings for setting up the AMI instance, the default security setting does not work."

7/4/2009: Chapter 5: typo on page 98 and a correction to example program

In the middle of page 98, change two occurrences of "http::" to "http:". Also, in the test file redland_demo.rb, globally make this same edit.

6/7/2009: Chapter 10: Note on installing scRUBYt!

Make sure that you get Peter's version 0.4.11 from github, and not the released gem:

	gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
	gem install scrubber-scrubyt

6/5/2009: Chapter 9, "Using JRuby and Lucene"

The build instructions are listed as:

	git clone git://github.com/davidx/jruby-lucene.git 
	cd jruby-lucene 
	gem build 
	gem install jruby-lucene-*.gem

They should be:

	git clone git://github.com/davidx/jruby-lucene.git 
	cd jruby-lucene 
	rake build 
	gem install jruby-lucene-*.gem

Also: here, "gem" should be the JRuby gem, so unless the JRuby bin directory is before the Ruby bin directory on your path, you might want to use:

	jruby -S gem install jruby-lucene-*.gem

Also, when running the interactive example, it may be required to require rubygems before jruby/lucene:

	irb(main):002:0> require 'rubygems'
	=> true
	irb(main):003:0> require 'jruby/lucene'
	=> true

Chapter 11: "Using CouchDB"

In the code example:

	# with !, it creates the database if it doesn't already exist 
	db = CouchRest.database!("http://127.0.0.1:5984/test") 
	response = db.save_doc({'key 1' => 'value 1', 'key 2' => ..... })

For some versions of the gem, the method "save_doc" may be "save".