{ :from => Delhi, :about => everything }

Ok, so we had been shouting ourselves hoarse, claiming that Rails is all about developer productivity and joy. So is that all about it?, huh!, was the normal reaction. But isn’t that a big enough reason. Not for many people though.

Yes, we accept that there are some pain points, like hosting Rails applications at shared hosts. No we don’t need those in production, but don’t you wish it was easier to deploy a rails app for a quick review with a client (a client who can’t run it on his own machine). Yes php scores there, just throw the code on the server and you are done. Why do I still run this blog on wordpress and not typo or mephisto? The big reason is that it’s easy to let just apache handle everything.

But things might change soon with the launch of passenger aka modrails.

And the other classic allegation against Rails has been performance. Remember the discussion between JDD and DHH about CPU cycles vs. developer cycles. We are definitely headed in the direction of lesser CPU cycles for our Rails app. Rails2 made some advances towards that and with Ruby1.9 and YARV and Rubinium, we have high expectations. Also you have heard about Ruby Enterprise Edition , haven’t you?

So things might change, when people try to figure out the fastest web language or framwework , the next time around.

I and those around me here, are generally biased towards rails. Ruby makes us happy. For us the pleasure points in Rails were always far more than the pain points. The basic Rails principles of DRY and Convention Over Configuration clicked with us. Ruby’s and Rail’s simplicity and beauty clicked with us. We did not need hosting on shared hosts. We could work with Rails caching to improve performance. No wonder we were one of the early adopters of Rails in India. But today, I would like to thank the critics whose untiring rants have moved Rails in the direction of being much more than what is was a couple of years ago.

Some of those changes have been in rails, but more have been around it. If you would have noticed, most of these development are not in rails as such, but in the ruby ecosystem.

Rails provides developer productivity and joy; ease of deployment; and ever-improving performance. And no, now you don’t need to go back to Java. We knew it, I am just repeating it for you.

Extrapolate this one year old graph for yourself.

So what is your reason for not having rail-ed yet?

Update: Charles Nutter has a post on upcoming Ruby implementations here

Tags: ruby on rails, rails

The ~/works directory holds all the rails applications on my mac book. Some of these are VinSol projects, current and old. Some are my personal projects and some are open source apps like beast and radiant. There is a contribute app also as per HasManyThrough Josh’s recommendation.

[13:29:11 mjuneja works]$ ls -l | wc -l
 37 

There are 37 rails applications right now. This is purely co-incidental and has nothing to do with 37signals. ;-)

If I run all these apps on the default 3000 port, I cannot run more than one app at a time. If I run the apps at random ports, my browser history will not be app-sensitive. I am heavily dependent on my browser’s location bar’s autocomplete feature, so choosing random ports for my apps is not an option.

I want to be able to run apps on different but fixed ports. I need to be able to make use of my browser history. Also I need to spend minimum time configuring any new app.

This is what I did

I created a YAML file called rappaport.yml. The name rappaport is a short form for “rails application ports”, the fact that my wife runs a diamond jewelery business is purely co-incidental ;-)

The yaml file consists of application names and they port assigned to them, as show in this sample below

Next, I have a ruby script ss (short for start server) in the ~/works directory.
All the rails projects have a softlink to ss from their RAILS_ROOT. To start the web server for a project, I just need to execute ss from the app’s RAILS_ROOT.

The script assumes that the application name in the yaml file is the same as the directory name under which the rails code for the app lives ( convention over configuration! )

Everytime I create a new project, I append the app name and port to rappaport.yml. Also I create a softlink to ss from the RAILS_ROOT.

So I have a fixed port and a standard command to start the server for all my apps.

The next part is training the browser to access the application, on the same port each time, with minimum intervention from me.

Here, I make use of another ruby script called browser.rb.

This script takes rappaport.yml as the input and creates a list of links in a file called dev_bookmarks.html as the output.
I need to execute this script everytime I add a new project to rappaport.yml.

This is what dev_bookmarks.html looks like

Now I just need to add the contents of this file to Quicksilver’s index.
I go to Quicksilver’s Preferences and click on Catalog and drop the file dev_bookmarks.html from finder onto Quicksilver and Click “Rescan source”

In the information panel, I select “omit source items” and “Include content: HTML Links” and Rescan source.

I can see that the content panel contains all the links.

I can see the project links in the content meaning that quicksilver has correctly parsed the content. On the attributes panel, I select “Include in Global Catalog”.

To point my browser to a rails application running on localhost, I invoke the quicksilver hotkey and start entering the project name, and quicksilver prompts me the project name, and it already knows the port number too.

Tags: ruby on rails, quicksilver

PuneRuby Guru Satish Talim recently posted about Companies in India he would recommend for Rails development. Vinsol is mentioned among the companies he recommends in his post.

Obviously makes me feel proud.

Thanks Satish.

Tags: ruby on rails india

Here are the sessions I plan to attend at RailsConf2007.

http://myconfplan.com/users/mjuneja/conferences/RailsConf2007

Thanks DrNic for the cool app 8-)

Tags: rails, ruby on rails, railsconf

Build you own Ruby on Rails web application is a book specially written for people wanting to start exploring rails. It is being pitched as the “ultimate beginners guide to Rails” by sitepoint.
So if you have been appreciating Rails from outside, get hold of this book and jump right it. Start experiencing the joy of Ruby on Rails programming in hours, if not minutes.

This book is also an exteremely useful resource for companies who want to train developers on Rails.

Thanks Jamis, for the review which made me look at this book. Now that a new rails book is coming out almost every fortnight, it’s getting difficuilt to keep track.
Also there is this gem hidden in Jamis’ review : never use a plugin you would not be able to write yourself. We have learnt it the hard way and I am sure so have many other Rails developers.

Tags: ruby on rails, rails, book

Believe me! The scene is much hotter than what I had anticipated a few months back.

Good to see so many companies and developers jumping ( or wanting to jump) onto Rails/Ruby from other frameworks and languages.
This means increased competition for us. But it could also be consolidation time for the small agile Rails teams in this area to join hands to increase their offering.

Talking about demand; yesterday, I received a job offer from a “Big Indian Outsourcing company”.
The lady who called me read this blog, but probably didn’t read “technopreneur” written on the top.
So when I told her that I was running a company myself, there was dead silence for a couple of seconds.
Then she asked me, if I could give references of any Rails programmers.

I told her that If I came across good people, I’ll hire them and I’ll pass on the others to her.
Fair enough. Right!

Tags: railsindia, rails, ruby, rails in india, ruby on rails