Episode 6: Tool Time! 3
Posted Monday, February 04, 2008 08:23 by chaupt
I admit having that stereo-typical engineering(?) trait of liking shiny new tools. It is always interesting to me to find a new and more efficient way of getting a task done, and I’m particularly fond of automation in my development practices. I’ve also been through enough project cycles to understand the trap of the golden hammer and the need to be very open to trying something new.
With that in mind, it was a lot of fun to enter the Ruby on Rails development world over the last couple of years and start sampling the offerings. Because of its relative newness, the tools world for both Ruby and Rails is a bit more sparse than other technologies. Due to its high profile and popularity, though, it is catching up quickly.
In our latest podcast, Episode 6 we direct our attention towards the tool ecosystem for Ruby and Rails, and present a whirl-wind tour of some of the tool categories and popular choices in those categories. In almost all of the tools we mention, we’ve had an opportunity to at least try them, and very much recommend you do the same. The great thing about most of the available tools is that they are open source offerings, so you can try freely and even make contributions back if you can. In the cases of the commercial tools we mention, the various vendors are paying serious attention to the community, and staying on top of the rapid evolution of the platform.
In the future, we’ll be adding many more links to tools to BuildingWebApps.com, so check there for more articles and resource links. We’d also like to hear from you regarding your favorite “must have” tool for your web development utility belt. If there are tools that you would like us to write-up, let us know that too.
http://blog.buildingwebapps.com/2008/2/4/episode-6-tool-time
This was my favorite episode by far. I am not a complete beginner to Rails, so the first few episodes were already things I knew. However, I am currently filling in the gaps of knowledge about things like documentation and deployment, areas where I am at the beginning of my education.
I haven’t been able to find concise tutorials on deployment. The different deployment options further complicate the process (shared hosting with or without FastCGI, a virtual slice (Slicehost), etc). The book that I had became useless in deployment as my hosting provider did not use FastCGI, hence I could not enter commands like: >> mongrel_rails start -e production -p 3333
As a beginner, it’s slightly frustrating to build an app then not be able to deploy it. I’d like to see a concise tutorial on how to deploy, for instance, on Slicehost.
Thanks for doing the podcast and the site.
Thanks for the feedback, Mike. In our future podcast series we are looking at peeling the onion a bit and going in to more detail on a variety of topics. Some of these topics are best suited for screencasts, articles, or other media besides purely audio formats like the current LearningRails series 1.
You are absolutely correct that deployment can be tricky, given all of the variations that each hosting option (and provider) brings that is unique. I hope to discuss some of this in the future.
In the meantime, we’ll be adding links to our Capistrano resource page and you might want to check out Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s book referenced on that page. It is still a Prag Prog beta book, but is promising.
-chris
Thanks for the link. Lots of good information on that page. The Pragmatic book looks promising too.