Moved my Ruby on Rails App to OCS Solutions

After spending about half my weekend working on this, I got my Ruby on Rails application moved from Planet Argon to OCS Solutions. In the process, I updated it to work with RoR v. 2.1.2 My former hosting company “fired” me as a customer earlier.

I wanted to try using mod_ruby a.k.a. Passenger, but I when I first configured my OCS account I took a path that precluded this. When I have some time, I’ll reconfigure my OCS account. But not this weekend

I also discovered a nice, and free, IDE to work with Ruby and Rails, NetBeans. It is far more mature product today than when I last looked at it a few years back. I also looked at RadRails but I like NetBeans much better. I’m not an Eclipse fan, RadRails is based on Eclipse.

My Ruby on Rails Web Host is Firing Me as a Customer

Not because of nonpayment or anything like that. PlanetArgon is no longer selling shared hosting services for Ruby on Rails (RoR) applications. Shared hosting works fine for the low volume Rails application I have, ActionShootingScores.com. They’re selling a higher end solution that I don’t need, nor want to pay for. Too bad, I was very happy with their service.

The issue for me, other than finding a new host, I developed my RoR application 2 years ago and the the framework has evolved since then. I have not had to do any maintenance on the program (because I did such a fine job writing it?) since 2006. So, I have to get it on the current framework before I can move it to a new host.

My MacBookPro came from Apple with Ruby, gems, and even the rails framework preinstalled. If you have OS X Leopard you have all this too. Bet most don’t know that, or even care. I installed MySQL on my mac when I first got it, so I thought I was ready to go.

Well, no. The preinstalled stuff was really old. Of course, the computer is about a year old. The trick to getting Rails going was the following commands in terminal:

sudo gem update –system

(not the above should have 2 minus signs, wordpress seems not to like this)

sudo gem update rake

sudo gem install rails

I was missing the first one, which needed to be run first. Now I can run the RoR samples. I tried my existing code with RoR 2.1.3 and got a bunch of errors. Guess I have a bit of work to do. At least I have some time before this becomes critical.

E Text Editor – Recommended!

I have been using a text editor called E on windows for some time now. I’m one of those programming dinosaurs that dislike IDE’s with a passion. Programming is about code. End of story. I also do my html and css by hand with a text editor. BTW I am stuck on windows at my work.

E  brings to windows the functionality of  TextMate on OSX.  Very good stuff! Highly recommended. Not free, but inexpensive at $35.

What prompted me to write about E was an email I got from E’s developer. I reported a minor bug a few days back, and today I got an email thanking me for the report and providing a link to new version of the program with the bug fixed. Is that a responsive company or what?

Some new programming books …

I’m reading: “Ajax on Rails” by Scott Raymond (O’Reilly) and “Prototype and script.aculo.us” by Christophe Porteneuve (Pragmatic Programmers).  These are very closely related  – Prototype and script.aculo.us are the ajax and html dom manipulation libraries that Ruby on Rails uses.

So far I have spent more time with Ajax on Rails. It’s very well written and I have learned much.  Prototype and script.aculo.us is a beta book – it’s a work in progress. I’ve bought beta books from Pragmatic Programmers before, they notify you when there is an update and you just download a new pdf file.