Recently I was asked the following question:

“How hard is it to build this project in Rails”

You can substitute this with anything. After a short period of time I realized that such a question can’t be really answered to a point where a programmer would agree completely if he/she didn’t even touched Ruby on Rails. In order to change that fact a person should see the whole process of developing and deploying a Rails application so he/she can realize the power and potential of a Rails application.

With all this in mind I hereby announce the Project type articles of RubyCorner.net. Those articles will represent an overview of the development process of a real working Rails web application. This article is the first of the series Project and it will begin not so briefly and give a more detailed overview of the things we will do. The next articles in the series will focus on more complex things and will skip those explained before assuming the knowledge was already obtained.

Let’s begin with our first web application project:

Project 1 – Developing a News site in Rails
parts count: 3 (this is a three day project)

Rails version used: 1.2.3 (used both on Windows and Linux platform)
Ruby version used: 1.8.5 (used both on Windows and Linux platform)
Knowledge of HTML and CSS: assumed
Knowledge of a Web Programming Language and Database: Basic-Advanced assumed

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I found an interesting topic recently in a forum discussion. It was about whether or not an eBay clone could be build on the top of Ruby on Rails. A few interesting questions are: “Is RoR the best toolkit for doing that?”, “Whether the
same eBay functionality could be accomplished?” or “Could it scale enough?”
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  Programming languages and tools from the business point of view  

Programming languages and tools are considered only for developers but smart companies have understood that in order to achieve best results they should not only care for business but for developers too. And what kind of better care than the one for programmers happiness and productivity by suppling them with the best tools available? This article intention is to point out in a bit of a story like form how Rails helps. It will go from the ways of developing a web application and points out some of the aspect in business and development which are really useful when a company chooses to use Rails for it’s development tool.

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Setting up a Ruby on Rails Application in a production environment could be a bit tricky. This is because the standard servers for running ruby could serve only one request at a time. As a result if there’s a slow database connection or any other process away from the application server no other requests could be served. On contrast Apache httpd spawns a new child if there’s a necessity to process a new request. In this article I’ll guide you how to solve this problem. Generally there will be an apache httpd server which will be used as a gateway to a cluster of mongrel_rails processes. So, all users will be accessing the apache as a frontend, however the whole processing burden will be let down to the mongrel servers. Here it is an example:

First to mention, I’m making this setup on Fedora Core 6. However it should be almost the same on older versions or other distributions. Note: Your apache should support mod_proxy_balancer (it is distributed with apache 2.2.x). So, the basic software requirements are:

• Ruby - You won’t go without a ruby interpreter (preferably version 1.8.5). On a Fedora 2 I did a source “compile and install” without any complications
• ruby-devel package - In case that you’ve installed ruby as a package you should install ruby-devel in order to compile a few mongrel related gems
• gem - The tool to install most of the extensions which are related to ruby. If you want to install from sources (it’s pretty easy: ruby setup.rb) you can download it from here: gem sources

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