This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Brad Wilson.
Original Post: De-Railed on Rails
Feed Title: The .NET Guy
Feed URL: /error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/dotnetguy/Rss.aspx
Feed Description: A personal blog about technology in general, .NET in specific, and when all else fails, the real world.
In the vein of learning a new thing every year, I decided that this year would be Ruby. I chose Ruby on Rails as my way into the Ruby landscape, since I have a lot of experience writing web apps.
I also reasoned that, since I had this nice Mac here with its Unix underpinnings, I would use that as my development platform. I wanted the things I knew would help me out: web server (Apache), source control (Subversion and WebSVN), a wiki (Ruwiki), a database (MySQL and phpMyAdmin), and of course, development tools (Ruby, Rails, Rake, etc.).
So far, I've spent about 18 hours on this project, and now I'm pretty much done. It has been a mess from the word go. Here are some things I ran across in the process:
Incompatible package managers. There's a few of these around, like DarwinPorts and Fink. None of them seems to put things in the normal places. DarwinPorts puts things in /opt instead of /usr. Fink puts things in an alternate file system under /sw, so the things you'd normally in /etc will be in /sw/etc. Neither one is entirely useful, since they're missing things, and other things are very out of date.
Compiling hassles. Once you abandon package managers, you end up downloading and compiling a lot of stuff for yourself. You have to track down dependencies, which is harder than it sounds. Some things, like PHP, can optionally depend on external libraries, but by default, won't include support. One example is MySQL. If you don't add special command line options to tell PHP where MySQL is during the build, then it won't work.
Compatibility hassles. Using the newest versions of things doesn't guarantee compatibility. The newest stable version of PHP 4.x is not compatible with the newest stable version of MySQL 4.x.
Confusing installations. It took quite a while to get WebSVN to run with PHP 4.x. Then the incompatibility between MySQL and phpMyAdmin forced me to upgrade to PHP 5.x. Luckily, WebSVN was forward compatible with PHP5. Rails installed, and runs with its own web server, but refused to work inside of Apache.
Broken downloads. The Gem for support MySQL won't download and build for Ruby, so it cannot be made to talk to a MySQL database.
For now, I think I'm done. I'm stuck, and not sure it's worth spending any more time on. Part of me wishes I'd started with a PC running Linux, but I'm not entirely convinced that I'd have gotten any farther along without the same gripes.
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of Brad Wilson, and not meant as an endorsement of or by any other individuals or groups. This syndication is provided for the private, personal use of individuals. Unauthorized commercial reproduction is strictly prohibited.
Previous Topic
