Submitted by “Ruby on Rails is a popular and powerful open source web framework for rapidly creating high-quality web applications to help you keep up with the speed of the Web. Rails is thriving on Mac OS X, and Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, Capistrano, Subversion, and other tools that help to streamline the development and deployment of Rails applications. This article gives you a full tour of Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Leopard – starting with building a web application using the latest Rails features with Xcode 3.0, and finishing with deploying the application to a production server running Leopard Server.”
Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard
21 Comments
google_ninja
I like RoR, I really do, and OSX is hands down my favorite operating system. But there is nothing more hip in the web development sphere right now then RoR on OSX. I find alot of RoR guys are absolutely insufferable with their holier then thou superiority thing, and because of bad experiences with them, it kept me from checking out the platform for a long time.
Jeff Atwood did a pretty good post on this here http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001065.html, about how DHH said basically that he chooses developers based on what platform they have experience on, and that he wouldnt hire anyone on windows due to the poor tools. Jeff basically says that attitudes like that make you a poor representitive of your platform of choice, and that DHH basically gave the impression that RoR on OSX is the platform of choice for douchebags. Your familiarity with tools are completely irrelivent, it is all about skill.
All that being said, RoR on OSX is a great platform. Just don’t let it go to your head.
2008-03-02 5:51 pm
Priest
There are some screencasts available at rubyonrails.org that are done in OSX.
Here is the URL:
http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts
Interesting stuff.
2008-03-03 6:47 pm
mabhatter
don’t forget guys that Apple OSX Tiger was a Java favorite platform as well. The integration with the OS components is beautiful…. But then Apple is “too busy” with other stuff to get Java 6 (over a year old) out with Leopard in a timely manner (yes, they have a beta if you know the secret handshake), which leaves students and such in the lurch compared to other platforms.
Or how MySQL broke and still nobody from Apple or MySQL has FIXED it officially. Apple won’t let you have the program (it’s a server app) and MySQL won’t repackage to fix the handful of bugs causing their download for Tiger to break. Grr..
This is my one complaint against Apple that they don’t support what Customers do when they don’t “feel like it” anymore. Even if your a mac + rails fan, don’t run out and buy a mac just for that because next week Steve may decide to break rails and leave you to fend for yourself.
2008-03-03 7:47 pm
openwookieJava is a bit different since it’s up to the vendor (Apple) to port Java to OS X. Ruby on the other hand has work well on OS X for quite some time before Apple was even interested in it, and like other OSS software is available through MacPorts.
Java may be available in a similar manner in the future now that Sun has relaxed the distribution restrictions (which were brutal in the past, at least when compared with OSS software).
The included Rails stack is indeed implemented VERY well. I am quite impressed with it overall. With the work that was put into it, and proper support for RubyGems built in, I believe that the Mac will continue to be the preferred platform for Rails development.
I only used XCode briefly, it is not bad at all, I just prefer my good old TextMate. It is my favorite Ruby editor and it just feels “right” to me. Since I have been writing Ruby on my Mac for quite some time. Netbeans never really felt right in my usage.
SimianPirate
I’ll admit I’m not necessarily up to date on these things, but when was the Mac annointed as the preferred platform for Rails development?
Check this blog post dated August, 2006, on the official rubyonrails.org site for an answer 😉
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2006/8/7/ruby-on-rails-will-ship-with…
Ok, good enough for me.
Like I said, I don’t follow RoR that closely, and had no idea that OSX had become that predominant as a development platform.
I will admit that I was presuming OSX favoritism, so will graciously eat my hat and admit that I’ve learned something new.
The entire RoR core team uses OSX and TextMate, which is a phenomenal editor.
I’ve been a UltraEdit guy for years now, but E-TextEditor got me to switch, and E is basically just an attempt to do TextMate on windows.
There are Rails core contributors like Tim Pope (tpope) that uses Linux/Vim too
Btw, tpope is also the author of Rails.vim and other good vim plugins.
And for me the best development platform is Linux of course.
Edited 2008-03-02 22:18 UTC
I didn’t know that, I shouldnt have used absolutes like that without checking it out. What I should have said is that OSX is home to the majority of the RoR community.
Thats better then rails on Windows, where your best bet for a ruby app server is IIS with FCGI 😉 The big reason everyone loves developing ruby on the mac is due to the killer text editor TextMate, which imo has no match on any other platform.
I have noticed a strong inclination towards MacOSX, TextMate, and very permissive licenses among the new generation of Python based web frameworks, as well. Those traits seem to come as a unit for some reason. Actually, the pattern seems to be to develop on MacOSX and deploy on Ubuntu Linux.
Anyway, while I’m posting, I’ll plug my personal favorite web framework:
http://www.djangoproject.org
Don’t ever mention django to a rails guy unless you want a fight 😉
django actually came first, python is a more mature language, and the interpreter is alot faster. ruby is arguably cooler, and rails has better code gen though.
If you ever get the chance, give TextMate a try. Itll really blow your socks off. As for OSX, it is just such a joy to use that if you are doing something as cross platform as web work, there isnt that much of a reason not to.
I should hope that it would not go beyond disagreement over a few points. The two communities have much in common. Where there is disagreement… well, those are in matters of taste. And, as always, there’s no accounting for that.
Django was not released until some time after rails. Although it did exist as an internal project at Lawrence Journal-World. Python’s library availability is much more complete, which I find to be a big plus. And it is a lot faster. I prefer Python, but sometimes feel that the Python community is a little too anal about “Explicit, not implicit”.
Yes, I’ve seen a lot of TextMate and OSX. And while I maintain respect for people who use them, I prefer to use FOSS tools, myself. Sometimes, I have to make tough decisions about going with FOSS or proprietary packages for my clients. But when it comes to my own personal use, and my own development tools, that choice is always easy. 🙂
As a minor aside, a proper IDE for Ruby and Python rocks!
If you want a FOSS editor with all the bells, whistles, refactoring support and a few kitchen sinks. Have a squidge at eric which uses the QT toolkit for widgest/gui.
eric3 for older QT3 library
eric4 for the new QT4 library
Ok, its written in Python, but its a Ruby and a Python IDE.
http://www.die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html
Well I started myself with Ruby and was going to learn RoR, but I’ve been sliding into Python and Django. I’m impressed, very =P but I love all my FOSS brothers. If your mind wraps around Ruby then go for it, if your mind wraps around Python instead, then go for it. Yes python in general feels faster, it closer to Perl in speed, but on a modern machine is the speed of your interpreted code the bottle-neck? Usually it will happen in the database layer first imho.
Anything beats the handcuffs of the commercial software world imho for Web work.
For your python editing, you could get the eric4 mentioned in another reply.
Or you get real nice environments with either
Komodo IDE, Wingware IDE on the commercial side.
With free Komodo Edit (edit only), or Wingware IDE 101 (for students so Auto Complete removed but still get debugger).
Its imho a he** of a lot better than a text editor. Especially when you do project management and get into refactoring code.
Vista doesn’t ship with Rails, does it….nuff said!
Same here. I use TextMate for all of my development.
My site is implemented in Rails on my iMac (thanks to DynDNS.org).
There isn’t much to say other than I really like programming Rails applications on OS X. It is a beautiful combination.
For everybody else not running Leopard (or if for some reason you need to have a second Rails installation) you can try out the BitNami Ruby on Rails installation program. It is a free installer for Apache, MySQL, Subversion, Ruby and of course Rails. It also works on Windows and Linux, so you can keep consistent development environments across machines and team members. Finally, it is self-contained so you can install multiple simultaneous copies and if you do not like it, just click ‘uninstall’
http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack“