I’ve developed a couple of small apps with Rails now. Its been a ROR’ING ride allright + alot of fun to get your hands dirty. I have heard people diss on Capistrano (misguided bloggers) alot on different blogs, talking about:

PHP did not kill Rails–Rails killed Rails. Who in their right mind is going to want to deploy 5 – 10 30 meg preforked processes per application from whatever location on this thing called “mongrel” and have the whole mishmash marshalled by this other thing called “Cappucino”… er “Capistrano”, which is lipstick on a pig, because rails is a pig no doubt about it. I need one server with several preforked processes for ALL applications to be served.

Rails is a pig? Errm don’t blame Rails but Scoble. Note Twitter’s unique position as a web application. It is neither solely a messaging app or a social networking app, but a combination of both. In the past companies had been able to build applications based on one of those foundations, but not both.

Ok onward with Capistrano. I am definitely going to give deploying my apps a try with Capistrano, it is the standard way of deployment for Rails apps these days (at least so i have seen on the web).

I’ve developed http://pantherfotos.com in Rails in about 3 months (3 hours a day working on the train from and to work). It contains about 60 database tables which power: forums, blogs, photo uploads, google map integration, dzone/digg type listing directory, security, monthly memberships, e-commerce (selling of photos and photo albums), taxonomy (polymorphic), an articles section, member clubs (with the ability for members to create public/private clubs and clubs to create public/private forums), RSS feeds (with geotagging where available) on pretty much everything, commenting system (with akismet integration) on everything (polymorphic)…..

I probably forgot a few things there. Point is all this comes in at 6353 lines of code. It takes me under 30 seconds to update my website via Capistrano and Subversion.

PHP sucks balls. I know because I used it for three years. No PHP framework will ever turn me back to the shit side of the force!

I won’t say much till i start deploying my app, but i have a gut feeling that it will be just fine, even if it takes a little while to get the hang of it. I am not taking anyones side here, however i feel Rails is definitely a complete framework that cannot be ignored or tainted by ignorant people.

What is Capistrano? Jamis Buck is the author of the Capistrano remote-administration utility, and is currently employed by 37signals.