State of RoR: the kids have it so easy

14 May 2008

I have been observing the developments in the RoR world with quite some interest lately. I think there are a few very significant improvements - the most important being the availability of modrails. The installation and setup is almost a no-brainer. I still remember the amount of pain it took to get Rails up and running in Apache2. And all the varying combinations of "best setups" offered - Apache (1.3), Lighttpd, LiteSpeed, Nginx, and finally, we're back to Apache2. It's about time. I think this will give a big boost to Rails adoption.  I really like that I can run multiple Rails apps on a single server with just a vhost setup, instead of mucking around with modproxy.

Next, I've been reading about Slicehost quite a bit, and I thought I should give it a shot. So we setup our staging server there, just to give it a shot. I ended up being very impressed - especially, I really like articles.slicehost.com - amazingly detailed and clear-cut source for setting up Rails apps on Slicehost. And pretty up-to-date too. I just finished setting up a Rails app on a Hardy Heron slice with the site's help. I still remember the hoops we had to jump through to get the 'perfect setup' done on a vps. Really, the kids have it so easy these days.