‘Note to self’
Make sure to remove all pp stanzas for debugging rails apps under webrick. While they work fine there, that is printing to stdout for apache, and hence break everything when one of them is tripped.
Lesson learned, moving on.
‘Note to self’
Make sure to remove all pp stanzas for debugging rails apps under webrick. While they work fine there, that is printing to stdout for apache, and hence break everything when one of them is tripped.
Lesson learned, moving on.
It’s been a while, so there will probably be a couple of posts coming in rapid fire, especially as Tuesday is going to land me with a nice 7 hour car ride to Canada (at least I’m not doing it alone this year).
A couple weeks ago, I knew I had to revive my old labtrack application at our lab, as everyone was getting confused about who had which machine, and for how long. When we had this problem about 4 years ago, I took a week, and built a perl application that would nicely manage it all for us. That fell into disarray a couple years ago.
Staring at the old code, I realized that if I was going to do this again, I needed to do at least the following:
After looking around a little bit, I decided that Ruby on Rails was worth trying, so I’d at least have an opinion on whether or not this “web 2.0” thing is total hype, or if there is some usefulness in it. For those that have been living in a cave for the last year, Ruby on Rails is “the new hotness” when it comes to web development. It is a very cleanly separated Model-View-Controller framework for the Ruby language, which has generators for many of the most common things you would do.
Verdict: Ruby on Rails does deserve some of its hype
Longer Verdict
It took me 2 weeks to build my Ruby on Rails app over the course of nights and weekends (not 2 hours), in that time I did read 250 pages of the Ruby on Rails book as well. For me, the hardest part of the framework was understanding all the implicit relationships between the MVC layers. It wasn’t until the in depth section of RoR that it sunk in. I guess a lot of that comes from my own bad habbits, where naming wasn’t always consistant between layers of an application. In Ruby, if you keep them very consistant, you get a lot for free.
Things I really like about Ruby in General, and Rails in specific:
Things the annoy me about Ruby, and Rails:
Overall, Ruby is definitely growing on me. And RoR is a much better (safer, better habbits) approach than random PHP that I’ve seen as largely the alternative in this space. We’ll see how this first deployment goes today, then I’ll decide if RoR has a place in my toolkit.