OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
Recently, I completed my first Ruby on Rails application, which you can see here. Its not a complex application, basically its a survey of political candidates with three data models: candidate, question, and answer. Pretty straightforward.
I built the Ruby app using Scaffolding, which was very easy and I liked alot. Scaffolding gives you the nice pre-configured classes and pages for adding, editing, and deleting records, but my survey doesnt line up exactly to that model (ie, I dont want anyone to go edit or create the questions on the survey, and I wanted to create a flow from creating your candidate record to then answering each question in the proper order). With some help from Eric, I soon got into the REST mindset and got the application working properly. That was cool.
I didnt consider deployment too much until I had the app completed and working on my local instance. My plan was to just deploy it to my DreamHost account, which I assumed would be easy. Im used to deploying .NET applications, which is extraordinarily simple, and it didnt occur to me at first that Ruby might not be as easy. After copying my files out to DreamHost, I found this wiki page of theirs. I was a little bit annoyed at first after reading that, because I realized I would have to run a bunch of commands to get rails running and the permissions correct.
Fortunately, as Eric pointed out to me, DreamHost already has a solution. Now they use mod_rails, and all you need to do is copy out your code, check the box for mod_rails, and then use their configuration panel for that domain to point to the public directory used by ruby on rails. After doing that, everything worked great and I have to say that I am now pretty sold on Ruby on Rails. One thing Ive always liked about .NET is that its pretty easy to deploy. Now that Ive seen Ruby on Rails can be easy to develop and also easy to deploy (at least with DreamHost), its a much more attractive language to me.