Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Hardy Heron
For the past 16 months, I've been working almost exclusively with Drupal to build websites, and I've got pretty good with it. However, I'm always conscious of the old adage that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", so in the interests of expanding my toolbox, I'm taking a look at Ruby on Rails. I'll leave the arguments about whether this a good new tool to add to my toolbox to others - the argument that convinced me is "it will be interesting and good mental exercise, and there could be benefits to my business too.
Getting something fairly cutting edge installed on an Ubuntu server is never a simple task - fortunately, there are some great step-by-step guides out there:
- Install Ruby on Rails - I'm actually running Hardy because it's the LTS version, but the instructions worked perfectly
- Install mod_rails - to get it running on Apache (although I did also have to install the build-essential package to make this work)
- Test it with a basic app
And as if by magic:
Now to start playing/learning!
Comments
I hope you're getting on well with RoR. I like the direction and so-called 'pragmatism' of Rails and the elegance of Ruby and so RoR on face value looks like the perfect combination. I too, develop many of my sites in Drupal, but keep an eye out for new ways of working and thinking about software. I started studying the RoR stack of tools about 18 months ago as it promised to give speed or order to development. Once you get past the usual issues with learning a new language/framework (notably the 'Rails-way' of doing things and the nuisances of Ruby), you find yourself working withing a very powerful set of tools.
However... for each project, you find yourself staring at a zero framework- that is, the basic elements aren't there. This is where I believe Drupal is king. Not only do you get a powerful framework on which to build sites and systems- you also get the added bonus of user/content management, categorization, file uploads, caching etc etc.... For me RoR was just taking too long to do simple tasks and it felt like I were working with a native framework such PHP Zend or similar.
I've found that my refactoring and modular approach is far better in Drupal than RoR, but that said I'm better versed in Drupal. Where I think RoR stands up is by leading the way with REST and MVC separation- something I would to see Drupal adopt a little more. I'll keep my eyes open (as always) but for now I like my hammer and it deals with my customers' nails pretty well. I'd be interested to hear how you're getting on with RoR and how would compare it to your experiences using Drupal.
All the best,
Barry
Real Life Design
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