I really wanted to give rails a shot
I am going to start on a new project that needs to be deployed on inexpensive hosting servers by non-technical people. Naturally this pretty much rules out a Java app even though that is my bread and butter environment. While I am learly about ease of deployment of a rails app by a non-technical person I thought I would give it a shot anyway.
So it has been many months since I have last dabbled with Ruby so I thought I would do an update first. Nice try. I got nothing by 404 errors while it was trying to update various libraries. OK, I’ll take the easy route. Install and reinstall with the latest stable release. No problem right? I wish. I downloaded 1.8.6, installed via the supplied installer, installed the rails gem, mongrel and mysql stuff.
I then tried to connect it to an existing database to start work on. Set up the database.yml file to point to the db and all I kept getting was some error that said I had a “1 for 2″ problem of some sort. Yea, that is real descriptive and helpful. An hour goes by, did a few google searches with nothing helping.
I figure, OK, I’ll just get one of my older projects running that was working before right? Nope, still wouldn’t work. Same types of errors. After more than two hours wasted of non-rapid application development I decided to drop the idea of using Ruby. It is a shame because I really want to learn it, but if the stable release can’t get shit working then I can imagine the nightmare of trying to get this thing running on a hosted environment.
Resisting the urge to fire up eclipse and start doing some Grails work, I turned to the old cheap standby, PHP. Seems there is a rails-like framework called CakePHP. Easy download, decent documentation and being PHP it should pretty much run anywhere. I did have to install Apache on my windows box, but with the wamp distro that was simple enough. I was up and running in no time and with a few minor initial quirks that I’m not sure I like it works pretty good. Onward and upward from here.
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Comments
I’m a Perl guy but when I’ve had to go PHP I’ve used CodeIgniter. Another little framework that works pretty nice. I’d prefer it had an actual data model (although there may be a plugin for this now) bit all together a nice one to work with as well.
I mentioned my rails troubles to a fellow coworker and he suggested I try the Bitnami rubystack distro. I’ve downloaded it but yet to install it.
However I took a look at CodeIgniter on Dave and Gregg’s suggestion. I must say I like it so far. It doesn’t have that magic stuff that CakePHP has, but I’m not yet convinced that is a bad thing just yet. I liken it to say using Stripes (of which I used quite often) vs. say Grails or some other ‘full’ framework.
Sorry for the dupe comments there. I seem to get some weirdness when the captcha comes up (sometimes it doesn’t appear…).
CakePHP is an excellent framework. If you’re planning on using it use the Pre-beta 1.2 version. IMO, they name the stuff wrong. It’s actually quick functional. The added functionality far out way the minor bugs you may encounter when compared with the 1.1 version.
[...] Thinking Outloud wrote an interesting post today on I really wanted to give rails a shotHere’s a quick excerpt I am going to start on a new project that needs to be deployed on inexpensive hosting servers by non-technical people. Naturally this pretty much rules out a Java app even though that is my bread and butter environment. While I am learly about ease of deployment of a rails app by a non-technical person I thought I would give it a shot anyway. So it has been many months since I have last dabbled with Ruby so I thought I would do an update first. Nice try. I got nothing by 404 errors while it wa [...]
[...] a recent post I mentioned how I really wanted to try Ruby on Rails for a new project but couldn’t get it running. Given the requirements of my application I [...]
Though I’m a Perl guy, I’ve used CodeIgniter when I’ve had to go the PHP route. Not a bad little framework either.