Last night I tried the RM-Install product from Five Runs. It’s a multi-platform (Linux and Mac) Ruby on Rails Stack powered by BitRock. It is very similar to the Windows RubyStack offered by BitNami, but it is also supports a production install option.

I tried the development install and it was very easy to click next a few times and let it run. The very first thing I tried doing was updating the gems with “sudo gem update”. It failed giving me an error about not finding a file in require for some ELFClass. I’d never seen that before when updating gems, so I’m inclined to think that it may be something from within the RM-Install package.

So at the end of my first experience with the RM-Install stack, I think it’s a better solution to just create your own shell script for installing your Ruby/Rails environment.

If you still haven’t tried Sinatra (which you should have by now) then maybe you just need some additional resources.  Here is a site with some tutorials and a screencast.

I started playing more with Sinatra, and I have so many ideas for it’s usage.  At work I’m using to prototype a quick way to enable remote execution of .Net command line apps.  So I started looking into DataMapper as well to use with it.

So far I can’t get the datamapper gem to install on either XP or Ubuntu.  It gives me the same compilation errors on either platform.  I realize the problem is that I’m missing some software I need to build, but it still seems like a hassle.  Active record “just works”.

I saw a lot of buzz about the new Sinatra web framework and decided I’d give it a try. I have a client now that has a simple site they need up now and then I can migrate them to Rails over time. When I saw how easy Sinatra looked, I thought I could give it a chance to see what it could do.

I installed Sinatra via RubyGems:
gem install sinatra -y

After that I created a simple file following the example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
"Now we're cooking with gas"
end

But much to my dismay, nothing happened when running this on my windows box. I instantly searched Google for “Sinatra on windows” and found the Google Group for Sinatra and a post explaining that Sinatra doesn’t run on Windows yet. As I read into the thread, I found someone had some suggestions for making it work.

John Bledsoe had the following suggestions:

My humble suggestion would be to remove the FileUtils#touch from
Sinatra::Server#tail and update Environment#prepare_loggers to
something like:

def prepare_loggers(logger = nil)
if logger.nil?
FileUtils.touch(Options.log_file)
logger = Logger.new(open(Options.log_file, 'w')
end
end

Making these changes allowed Sinatra to run, but it wouldn’t server the page. Instead it returned an error:

Fri Nov 09 16:26:26 -0800 2007: ERROR: undefined method `info’ for nil:NilClass

I made a post to the group and was promptly replied to! The general advice given is that it is a rapidly emerging framework undergoing a lot of changes and to check back soon.

More on testing Sinatra in Linux coming soon….

In my continued quest to use Ruby to build my .Net apps, I have been successful using Ruby’s “sh” command to call the C# compiler (csc.exe) and successfully build my assemblies. I still have not gotten it to use MSBuild, but I’ve been lazily trying to use the .csproj files generated by Visual Studio, but it doesn’t seem to work. MSBuild acts like everything worked, however no files get changed. I guess I’ll actually need to take a look at building it with MSBuild and then incorporating that back into a Rake task.

So I’ve started down the path of setting up continuous integration (CI). I’m working on a project now for a client that wants to be involved with the process as much as possible. The CI with a few other hacks will allow him to use the current working version of his website at anytime.

I started looking into some CI products and ended up watching a screencast on CI Factory. I was amazed at my initial reaction (yuuk!)! I’m not knocking CI Factory directly, rather the fact that I need to configure a product that will configure a suite of products for me sounded like something that would be overly complicated to maintain / use. This is not what I need to stay agile and keep a client involved.

So in my tinkering with RoR, I ran into CruiseControl.rb. This product was easy to install and I already had the required dependencies from my RoR work. It works out of the box for RoR, but needs a little love for building .Net apps.

I started out by deciding that I was going to continue to use MSBuild for building my projects and use CrusieControl.rb to do the CI and other tasks not including the actual build. This would allow me to continue to work in Visual Studio as normal without changing a development process already underway.

So far I have integrated Rake into Visual Studio, created a rake file in my solution and created a task to build my projects. It works great from the command line (rake dotnet_build) but when calling from CruiseControl, it throws an error that is probably complaining about not having resgen.exe in the path – that will be taken care of soon and I plan on publishing a full post on each step in the near future.

I am very excited by the possibilities that Rake and Ruby bring to my .Net development. I’m already thinking of how to integrate this with the new IIS 7 API to have a Capistrano like feel to deploying my ASP.Net apps.

Update 2/8/2008: Since I posted this they shipped the release version and now intellisense is working beautifully. Over the last month NetBeans has become my go-to IDE for Rails.

I downloaded and started using NetBeans 6.10 Milestone 10 last night. I am thoroughly impressed! I’ve been using Aptana(RadRails) and Komodo Edit and although each is a decent Rails IDE, NetBeans has the better features by far. The Intellisense / Autocomplete crutch feature that I have become dependent on accustomed to is the best one I’ve seen for Rails so far. The intellisense for CSS and Ruby is good, but it doesn’t pick up Rails specific methods or objects.

Some of the features I have instantly enjoyed:

• I also love the CSS editor and it’s live element preview.
• It has a great way of displaying project files where you get the models, views and controllers folders up front and you still get the ability to look at the file structure in the normal way.
• I like the Subversion integration.
• It has a GUI front-end for managing Ruby Gems!
• One button click to run all tests
• An Action Navigator accessible within the controller – one click brings you to the action.

For a free editor, this IDE is a very nice option if you’re into Rails development!

Like a couple of aging heavyweight fighters, Java and Microsoft have been slugging it out in the enterprise web application market for some time now. It seems like the fight continues round after round with no real winner in sight. But there have been some very interesting things happening in the last month that seem to indicate that the conditions may be right for Ruby on Rails (RoR) to slide in take some of the “Enterprise” market share.When I refer to “Enterprise” I am most certainly pointing at the plethora of programming shops where they’re sticking to ASP.Net or JSP and Servlets. I have worked in the former for the last 8 years and have worked with external vendors and service providers that were the latter. Many of the platform discussions came down to the same points. Funny thing is, they seem similarly bloated at times for solving some of the same everyday problems. If you want to see a good comparison of Ruby to C# (Java guys will feel at home too), check out Softies on Rails.

For the Java environments, JRuby has hit another milestone and they are confident enough to hang it out there for RoR developers to give it a shot. Building a Ruby interpreter on Java instead of C allows you to extend the Java classes, deploy Rails applications to a web server as a WAR file, and provide similar portability to RoR as Cold Fusion enjoys.

For the Microsoft environments, the IIS Team announced they have implemented Fast CGI for IIS 7. This will make RoR on IIS more efficient and easier to deploy. Rob Conery has the drop on this as well as instructions for how he was able to make this work. Rob is the founder of a framework for .Net inspired by Rails called SubSonic and if you write ASP.Net 2.0 applications, you need to take a look.

Both of these recent events seem to indicate that in organizations that already have a significant amount of infrastructure built up in either Java or .Net will not have to do much at all to make Rails run in the same environment. I think this will lead to greater adoption because it will be faster and easier to deploy and configure, making it an easier sell to your development manager, VP, etc., or for you to sneak it in.

I used Vista for over a week and I was not impressed. I was not particularly thrilled that when deleting some files I had to do 3 separate actions because of the Windows Defender crap. It made me feel like Windows was trying to defend itself from me. I like my operating systems subservient! I want to be in control of my computing experience. So the box that Vista lived on has started it’s conversion to a dual boot Ubuntu / XP Pro machine.

The part that burns me the most is Microsoft is huge!  They have so many developers and resources, so why is it that their OS takes 551 MB to sit idle and won’t see more than 2.8 GB of ram?  This is what the World’s Greatest software company has to offer?

As I move on into learning more about Ruby and Mono using the Ubuntu partition, I will still need the XP partition to use my RealFlight G3.5 R/C simulator and have a stable installation of Visual Studio 2005. I can not go cold turkey yet! (And as bad as their OS may be, their tools are very good.)
So far I have completed the Ubuntu partition. It took me about 3-4 hours total to install, update, and add all of the software I wanted or needed. I have installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Ruby, Java, Eclipse, MonoDevelop, Apache, PHP, MySQL 5, OpenOffice, and PHPMyAdmin.

As an interesting observation, I have had some trouble with this hardware accepting 2GB of ram and the onboard NIC operating at the right speed when using Vista and XP. I have not seen the same problems while running linux.

The much anticipated Rails 1.2 release has offically arrived!