Mental Pandiculation

When I first started doing web development with Visual Studio 2005, it was pretty painful work. Not only was the development itself difficult in many ways (if I say “typed DataSet” and “bloodthirsty bedbugs”, which makes you cringe more?) but the deployment of sites was often a long, tedious manual process for a site of any size. I distinctly remember having to log into my hosting provider, upload a zip file or collection of files, manually unzip or move them around and then hope that everything and the stars were lined up properly. Microsoft tried to make things easier with the Publish technology from Visual Studio but that never worked particularly seamlessly, at least not in my limited experience. On top of all that, it required considerable discipline (and a kickass source control which I’m not sure existed) if you wanted to deploy certain changes but not others.

Take a quantum leap forward into 2011. Over the last 3.5 days, I built a website to serve as my central home on the web, a place where I can aggregate my work, writing and other activities easily. I built the site in Rails, used git for source control and when it came time to deploy the site, Heroku for the hosting. To deploy my site, I had to do to things:

heroku create

and

git push heroku master

When that was done, I had a live, working test site on the internet that I could test in multiple browsers, get feedback on, etc. When I was ready to redirect my current home on the web to the new one, all I had to do was add a custom domain and Zerigo DNS add-on at Heroku, update my nameservers and presto chango, the production site was up and running.

On top of that, because branches are so painless and easy in git, I can create a new branch, work on it, merge it with the master and update the site all from the command line of my laptop. The idea of having to log into a hosting provider to upload files suddenly feels like waterboarding. If you have a significant test suite, it’s a matter of having your tests pass and then just updating your production site. Obviously, as a site grows, it won’t be quite that easy but it’s not going to get that much harder either.

The smart folks at Heroku have removed some of the major obstacles to web development so we can focus more on writing the code now and less on the administrative agony. On top of all that, for small sites like mine, the cost is negligible or non-existent. Lots of things aren’t better in 2011 than they were in 2002 (the world’s going to end next year) but web deployment, if you choose the right tools, is infinitely better in a way that’s almost inexpressible.

As with most of my endeavors, I suddenly decided last week out of the blue that I needed to write a web site in Rails. I don’t really recall the thought process (which should tell you there wasn’t any) that led to this decision but given the fact that I didn’t know either Rails or Ruby past what I had learned writing WATIR scripts, I knew I needed to find a good tutorial. I reached out to my extensive (read: 82 followers) Twitter network and was pointed towards the Rails Tutorial by Karthik. Over the past 5 days, I’ve been spending a significant amount of time on learning Rails and I have to say that I have no idea why it took me this long to come around to trying it.

Quite awhile back, I dove into learning Python and the Pylons web framework and for the most part, I was happy with it. I never deployed an app using Pylons but my Python skills got to be where I could at least make things work. I enjoy the Python language but I always felt like testing was a second class citizen to a large degree. Maybe I just never read the right tutorial but tests and deployment seemed to be an afterthought. In Python’s defense, it never seemed to have the “cool kids” momentum like Ruby/Rails. And Pylons certainly has different goals than Rails given the fact that Pylons gives you some defaults but let’s you do what you want whereas Rails has the Rails Way and it’s clear you stray from it at your own risk.

But learning Pylons especially always felt like I was stabbing at zombies in the dark. I didn’t have a good mentor other than the web and while I certainly could have read code trying to figure out best practices, I’m lazy and would at least like to have some reasonable semblance of a roadmap to guide me. With Rails in general and the Rails Tutorial linked above specifically, the road map is more like a TomTom GPS system, giving you the steps you need to create and deploy applications in Rails right from the start. The emphasis on testing, source control and deployment is refreshing since I imagine that being a major headache of writing a decent sized web application in a new framework.

The use of convention over configuration, long a selling point for Rails, is wonderful. There are so many places over the last few days where I have compared my experience in the ASP.Net world to what I was learning in Rails and found the former terribly lacking. As an example, in ASP.Net MVC, named routes have to be created explicitly but in Rails, many useful named routes are created for you based on convention.

Another place Rails seems to have the advantage is database updates as you develop an application. I just went through a situation where I had to manually define how a couple of people would deal with updates to a database while working concurrently on a project. With Rails, it’s built in through the concept of migrations. So many pieces of the plumbing that you have to deal with on normal projects is just handled. I’m sure there are gotchas waiting to jump up and bite me but for someone first learning a framework and comparing it to other experiences in the past, it’s wonderfully refreshing to find so many pieces of the puzzle are taken care of for you.

On top of that, as someone who has struggled with how to coordinate programming styles and conventions on projects in the past, imagine my excitement when I learned about the Rails Way and convention over configuration. If you just do things the Rails Way, not only are certain things taken care of for you, but you can count on Rails code being comparable across projects. Imagine reading the open source code for a couple of ASP.net projects. While ASP.Net MVC has certainly moved the slider bar over towards convention, chances are the two projects would have drastically different flavors. Yet it seems to me that Rails projects would likely be reasonably similar.

Overall, I’m thrilled (obviously since I just ran through 700 words detailing my excitement) with Rails and the potential it has in my development toolbox. While it’s certainly early and I’ve no doubt been excited about things in the past, it’s encouraging to feel comfortable in a framework to some degree right from the start. Of course, major props has to go to Michael Hartl who wrote the tutorial I’m learning from. He’s done a fantastic job of laying out a good course through the material with reasons for doing things in a particular way. I intend to buy the screencasts once I work my way through the online book because I imagine they are filled with exactly the same kind of good teaching that is available in the book.