Development Methodologies…
Lots of people develop in lots of different ways, and I’ve found none less varied than the methods used by those who develop in Rails. Most Rails developers write on their local machines, with local implementations of Ruby, Rails, Gems, MySQL/PGSQL/YourFlavorRDBMSHere, and WEBBrick. I was cajoled and poked and prodded into using this methodology lately, instead of my normal methods.
In fact, I was kvetching on a list recently about how much I enjoyed and hated using TextMate to develop in, and wished it had SFTP support so I could work like I normally do… Development instance up on my server, source on my server, editing tools local. Most of the people on the list reminded me that good developers wreck their own computers first, servers second (after releases and stuff).
So, I moved to the Mini that I use to code on (and for my everyday desktop). Wow. Talk about S-L-O-W. I mean, Wow. I was reminded of coding in Pascal in High School on my NEC V20 based PC. We are talking 1985 binary sort slow. Wow.
I persevered, pushing on, coding against my own PC. Update javascript, press F5 - dah-dum-dah-dum-dah-dah… check email… hmm hmm HMMM hmm hmm… test code.
I have moved back to coding with Dreamweaver against my server. Its not in production yet, and ligHTTPD is sooo much faster. Maybe I am too ‘Instant Gratification Generation’ ( give it to me now, give it to me now! ).
What do you code in, readers? How do you setup your development environment?
January 16th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Who told you to use the Mini? I suspect they assumed you had a faster machine…
January 16th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
I ne’er told them it was a Mini… and in any event, my mini is actually a pretty quick little box!
Maybe I can get my boss to pony up a new dual-core iMac 20″…
January 16th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
I develop on Ubuntu 5.10 (locally) against Rails 1.0, MySQL 4.1 and Webrick and move to the Debian server to test and deploy on Apache. I use a combination of editors: RadRails, Bluefish and VIM. VIM being favorite.
RadRails is nice, but its written in Java and is a resource hog and slower than VIM and Bluefish. If I could get code hints in VIM, I would probably use it for everything.
There are also other nice editors such as Jedit with Ruby extensions and FreeRIDE.
I think it’s all about personal choice. I only wish that Textmate was available on Linux. I would pay for it, no problem. (I went to purchase my first Mac the other day, but couldnt decide which one to get so i’m still on Linux for now)
January 17th, 2006 at 12:21 am
All code in subversion and i develop localy on my powerbook with locomotive and fastcgi. Couldn’t be better, fast and you can work everywhere.
Oh yes i use textmate for editing
January 17th, 2006 at 8:52 am
Since your on a Mac, I concur on locomotive:
http://locomotive.sourceforge.net/
It’s a simple pre-configured environment for Rails dev that uses ligHTTPd and FastCGI for development. It’s downright snappy on my dev machine — which is a quicksilver G4/867.
How much memory do you have in the Mini?
g.
January 17th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Greg:
I have one billion bytes of memory in my Mini. It always cracks me up to say that. Its a Mini. Billion. Nevermind, it’s not that good a joke anyway…
January 18th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Tracey:
check this out: http://www.schlitt.info/applications/blog/index.php?/archives/278-Comfortable-PHP-editing-with-VIM.html
maybe it’ll suffice to your VIM needs…
January 18th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
I must admit, I love Textmate. But I’d really like built-in scp/sftp support. It is the ONLY thing that stops me from using it 100% of the time.
How I do things?
I have a Debian box sitting under my desk that I do most of my developing in. For a text editor I use TextWrangler. Give it a go
(it’s free!)
My main machine is a G4 Powerbook with the Ruby/RoR development environment almost identical to the Debian machine I use.
Oh, and Subversion for version control.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I didn’t notice mention of fastcgi… developing rails apps is slow as molasses without fastcgi.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:05 am
I develop with Eclipse on my powerbook (although I’m not sure if hey have a Ruby/Rails plugin yet — if not, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time).
And at the end of the day, scp/sftp the code to the server for further testing. Then into cvs.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:11 am
Matt: I’ve considered going to Eclipse, but its such a large tool, and kinda confusing to use. I wish I had time to learn it, because it does run on every platform out there.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
I use a both a Powerbook and a Debian based laptop for development. I use Eclipse with the RoR plugins (Matt: Yes! They do have RoR plugins!) The plugins are available through the Eclipse > Help > Software Updates > Find and Install…
You just need to enter the ‘update site URLs’ (that would be the second option) The update site urls are:
For Ruby:
http://rubyeclipse.sf.net/updatesite
For Rails:
http://download.radrails.org/update
The environment on the Debian laptop and Mac Powerbook is identical with source in CVS. Currently using webrick because I have had lots of trouble getting lighttpd running… Maybe I’ll look into locomotive
January 20th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Peter:
Locomotive is awesome. Amazingly simple to use, provided you always remember to use the terminal from the app
That, coupled with TextMate has saved my keyboard from getting worn out from all the openapple-shift-U I used in Dreamweaver.
- K
January 20th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Kevin:
I will try out locomotive. I would like to sign up for the Simple Ticket beta… I (as well as another of the developers at my office) sent an email to the linked address, but am I too late because it is Friday already?