Ruby on Rails @ bluehost & general opinions

[beyondxm]

I'm just curious as to how many of you out there are using ROR. One thing that bothers me slightly about ROR is that its so buzz wordy (not much you can do there).

I like the framework alot and have found it a pleasure to develop in thus far. A little code in ROR goes along way...so what's not to like.

Anyhow....just looking for some general thoughts from people.

Thanks,
Michael

[ben_brown30]

I've used ROR to update a site that was previously all PHP based. Ruby is great, you have to produce less code and as its View/Model/Controller its structured much better.

It is a buzz word, but then again lots of other things have been buzzwords and are very good products. My only problem is that I've yet to work out a good way to develop on my local system and upload only the changed files by FTP automatically. I used to use Eclipse for PHP project and had 90% of my files in one directory meaning it was very easy to just upload a couple of changed files. ROR is a bit more complex as it has a full directory structure.

Documentation on the web seems to be fairly good, however I found that most of the tutorials often only give a very basic example and that to get any further you really need to delve into the official ROR docs and get used to using them.

[beyondxm]

Ben,
Have you tried radrails ?

http://www.radrails.org/

That's the best IDE i've found for ROR thus far.

Thanks for your perspective also,
Michael

[ben_brown30]

Yes I've tried radrails - trouble is I still have to individually upload files to the server, or upload every file (even the ones that haven't changed).

Take for example, developing JSP (Java Server Pages), these are all placed into an archive and a single archive is uploaded to the server (bit more complicated, but thats essentially it). With ROR you have to know which files have changed and upload those individually OR upload the whole directory strucuture.

That was what I was trying to get at!! Although I really love Rails!

[JoeP]

I've been using eclipse with the subversion plugin, subclipse, for my development environment. My site has a fairly complex directory structure and subversion/subclipse has helped me to keep track of what's changed.
I'm a total subersion newbie so I am not speaking from experience (yet) but there has to be a way to tag files that have been changed for a particular revision even after committing the changes.

good luck.
joe

[beyondxm]

How are you deploying your files ? Are you using a deploy tag ? Thats what I do with cvs...I dont have alot of experience with subversion, but Im guessing its the same sorta deal.

Thanks,
Michael

[JoeP]

How are you deploying your files ? Are you using a deploy tag ? Thats what I do with cvs...I dont have alot of experience with subversion, but Im guessing its the same sorta deal.

Thanks,
Michael
I'm sure that subversion has the same kind of tag, but I am not using it out of pure ignorance. Here's what I do (it's lame but it seems to work)

- My subversion workspace is different than my test server directory.
- Check out the file / directory that I want to make changes to
- as changes are made, but before committing them to subersion, copy the changed files to my test server and test them.
- If the tests work ok, commit the changes in subversion.
- If there are a lot of files touched, take note of which ones they are.
- FTP the changed files from the test server directory to the production server directory.

I do not want to put my test server directory under subversion because it is sometimes used as a sandbox/playground to try ad hoc experiments. I can always get back to a stable baseline by copying my subversion controlled directory into the test server directory.

I know that there has to be a much more sophisticated way to take care of this where a changelist would be generated automatically, but I have not spent the time to try to figure it out.
joe