Ruby on Rails with Mongrel Cluster and Apache URL rewriting on Windows

This is an excellent article on how to setup Mongrel and Apache under windows. Read the rest of this entry.

Ruby on Rails with Mongrel Cluster and Apache URL rewriting on Ubuntu

This workflow serves right for setting up ubuntu development machine for serving Rails applications with Mongrel Clusters and Apache. Read the rest of this entry

RoR and Agile development

Ruby on Rails is a great choice for Agile Development. Typically, in an agile environment, requirements evolve as a series of iterations where at the end of each iteration, a prototype is developed. This goes through the feedback cycle and that is incorporated for the next iteration.

RoR allows applications to be rapidly developed and incrementally extended with newer features. RoR is designed specifically to begin delivering features to support the business without architectural planning and up-front design. Its approach allows applications to be constructed and modified, structure changed and features adjusted to meet the changing needs of business (Source: Codegear’s Joe on Top 10 reasons to love Ruby on Rails).

Add to that, RoR provides the necessary versioning mechanism (freezing) to allow you to pin your application against a specific version.

Rails Strengths

Some of the documented strengths of rails are as follows:

• Rails embraces test-driven development
• Three environments – development, testing and production
• Database support: DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite
• Action mailer
• Action web service
• Prototype for AJAX

Sun supports Rails

Sun’s work on making Netbeans a Rails IDE is progressing at a rapid pace and JVM implementation of Ruby is also happening at a great speed. But what are sun’s interests in doing this, and the answers to it are not as yet out, and some of the thoughts of Rails Creator David Hansson is available here.

Rails Productivity

“I’d rather write programs to write programs than to write programs”. I remember seeing these on t-shirts that some of those geeks use to wear. This precisely is what accounts for the productivity gains of Rails. In addition to this, Rails also creates much of the scaffolding that you need which adds up to the productivity.

Typically, frameworks use extensive code generation, which gives users a one-time productivity boost but very little else, and customization scripts let the user add customization code at a few carefully selected points. Metaprogramming removes the disadvantages of these techniques and Ruby is one of the best metaprogramming languages where a code is used to write codes.

Scaffolding features of rails allows for creating the application quickly and see how the major components work together well.

Learning Ruby

Study notes for those who are new to the language and in search of a solid introduction to Ruby’s concepts and constructs. These study notes can be found here.

Comparison of Rails with other frameworks

This comparison was done by Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems. Specifically with respect to web applications, Rails scores over other frameworks in terms of development speed and maintainability.
 

Ruby Success Stories

Many people use Ruby in their daily jobs and some as a hobby. Ruby has been receiving a lot of attention and people have used ruby in simulations, 3d modelling, business, robotics, networking, telephony, system administration and web applications. Here is a sample list that I picked up from http://www.ruby-lang.org  

Learn more about Rails 2.0 through video

I read this post in http://weblog.rubyonrails.org. Thought, I will have it shared here as is.

Railscasts.com is running a special series on what’s new in Rails 2.0. They’ve been showing off how to simplify views, how to usethe new foxy fixtures, and how to use HTTP authentication. All great stuff. And they’re promising there’s more to come.