Comments on: How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better

By: Jourgenz

Jourgenz — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:32:32 +0000

It’s test.
I could’t post a message…

By: Buy Phentermine Online

Buy Phentermine Online — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:40:30 +0000

Hi, nice post. I couldn’t understand some parts of the article but it sounds interesting..
Continue writing…

By: toadalee

toadalee — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:37:19 +0000

So am I wrong to recommend using phpcake as your framework instead of rails if you want to use php? I have been looking at RoR and PHPCake and they seem very similar. Mambo has actually chosen phpcake for their next version (5). That should give it some clout.

By: andres

andres — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:58:46 +0000

It’s sort of lame asking the rails developers to thing about the shared environment, specially coming for a company that hosts several hundred of thousands sites.
The right move is to contribute with one developer, full time, and help rails having the features you are asking for.

By: phil

phil — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:36:46 +0000

You can’t compare an MVC application framework with a programming language/templating system. You need to either compare Rails and some PHP MVC framework or Ruby/ERB and PHP.

By: remi

remi — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:01:16 +0000

Christoph, let’s be real here; how many people out there are really building Ruby web apps without Rails? (Or Ruby apps at all, for that matter?) Is such a thing even possible on DreamHost?

@Albrigh:

You would be surprised! Especially since Christian Neukirchen’s awesome Rack.

I love Ruby. I very much like Rails, especially for the part it’s played in helping me to learn Ruby and … cause it’s just plain awesome.

That said … I don’t write many Rails apps. That’s mostly because of the resources they require, which is pretty ridiculous, and also because I typically just don’t need all of the overhead and the things Rails does. I’m happy working closer to the “real code.”

Lots of developers are writing apps using either Rack-compatible web frameworks, or using Rack, itself. Support Rack and you can easily run your site using CGI, FastCGI, Mongrel/Thin … or anything that has a Rack handler.

You would also be surprised about the number of people using Ruby ‘off rails’ or off the web, in general. It’s a good general purpose programming language. All you have to do is watch/browse Rubyforge to see all of the various thing people are doing.

Also, I like me frameworks that support Rack because it means it’ll run OK on dreamhost :)

Also, I dunno how people so easily overlook things like … eruby? Dreamhost has information about it in its wiki. It’s basically PHP-style development for Ruby. I’ve build sites that I would’ve used PHP for in Ruby, using eruby (on dreamhost) and I’ve had great experiences with it.

By: Kondo

Kondo — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:21:06 +0000

I have to say that dreamhost has good to me in the past years but I pretty close to take my rails app in to public beta and Dreamhost is just not suited to rails apps in its current state. I’m going with another provider where they gives user mongrel support and apache support (its not hard to do). Virtualization is a great thing and this other provider has embraced it very well.

By: Aaron Blohowiak

Aaron Blohowiak — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:12:56 +0000

Make your shared hosting force users to use jruby, this way most of your complaints disappear or become readily manageable.

By: Rob Morris

Rob Morris — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:23:14 +0000

I dunno, guys. I use A2Hosting.com for my Rails hosting on a $100/yr shared hosting package with shell access. They have cPanel 11 with Rails support, Mongrel, and I have never, NOT ONCE, had a server error due to deployment. I run 4 sites on two shared hosting accounts. It’s a piece of cake.

YMMV, but I think DreamHost may be scrimping on per/user RAM or some such, if this is such a big headache for them. I think extrapolating from one host’s experiences to a major problem with the Rails application stack (& core team) is a bit of a stretch.

By: Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar Wolf — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:42:13 +0000

Being a DreamHost customer, a Rails developer, a Debian developer and member of the Debian pkg-ruby-extras team (co-maintainer of Mongrel in fact ;-) ), I must say it amazed me how hard it was to get my systems running in DreamHost. I agree with Brent (first comment to this post - Shame that this blogging software limits postings with over three links :) Yes, spam sucks big-time), it is not a pleasant experience at all.
Terri complains about installing Gems in Debian systems (third comment to the post) - And boy, I share your pain. Our group in Debian has long been a strong critic of mixing RubyGems and Debian, as it is a sure way to mayhem and chaos.
But, DreamHost guys: Please reconsider moving away from FastCGI (which sucks) towards Mongrel. Yes, I agree with Dallas’ comment regarding Lighttpd and SCGI - In its due time, I bit the SCGI bullet and packaged SCGI for Debian. I even used it at one of my servers with libapache2-mod-scgi… And I recognize it is easier and more reliable than FastCGI. But just when I was about to make my experimental package into an official one, the Mongrel hype came up.
Anyway… Mongrel is reliable, it is quite easy to install - and (shared hosting providers, this is interesting to you!) it easily provides perfectly separated processes for each user. Even more, it is built to be used in clusters, so (putting that combined to Dreamhost’s way, where user directories are shared over NFS) it’s potentially very easy to make it scale, even send it to other machines. I have enjoyed a much easier deployment (and much more reliable ongoing operation) since I moved over to Mongrel.
Now, regarding how The Rails Way is sometimes a royal PITA… Yes, indeed. It shares very little with the Debian culture (with which I’m much more comfortable) that values long-term stability over changing features with the newest fads. But then again, Rails is a very productive and nice environment to work in!