has anyone made an all-Ruby website? how'd it go?

R

Ruby Baby

I run a website that's all PHP now, but was due for
a total re-write anyway. (The old code is a mess.)

It's more MVC style - where the code comes first and
outputs HTML from templates - NOT embedded code inside HTML.

I love Ruby so much that it's very tempting to write
my new version in Ruby (mod_ruby + Apache).

But I wonder if anyone who has already done a whole
interactive website in Ruby/modruby could share their
experience with it?

Were there any featured you really missed or any surprise
problems? Would you recommend it for someone else?

I know the question is vague, but I can't tell if I'd
be making a big mistake by trying it this way, especially
if I didn't realize until I was a month into it.

Thanks!
 
R

Raphael Bauduin

Ruby said:
I run a website that's all PHP now, but was due for
a total re-write anyway. (The old code is a mess.)

It's more MVC style - where the code comes first and
outputs HTML from templates - NOT embedded code inside HTML.

I love Ruby so much that it's very tempting to write
my new version in Ruby (mod_ruby + Apache).

But I wonder if anyone who has already done a whole
interactive website in Ruby/modruby could share their
experience with it?

Were there any featured you really missed or any surprise
problems? Would you recommend it for someone else?

I know the question is vague, but I can't tell if I'd
be making a big mistake by trying it this way, especially
if I didn't realize until I was a month into it.

Thanks!

I am in the same situation as you, and began to look at cgikit.
http://www.spice-of-life.net/download/cgikit/index_en.html

My only regret is that I didn't discover cgikit earlier. I can do everything
I did in PHP but much more cleanly, clearly, and also faster. The
infrastructure put in place by cgikit is really what is needed in web
development (I really like CKRepetition).

My only experience until now is to reproduce all kind of stuff I did in PHP,
but my next web development will be based on it as I could reproduce
everything in a matter of hours (included the time learning cgikit).

I don't want to diminish other ruby projects I didn't test (like SWS,
cerise, ..), but I'm really pleased with cgikit and can only encourage you
to take a look at it.....

Raph
 
J

James Britt

Ruby said:
I run a website that's all PHP now, but was due for
a total re-write anyway. (The old code is a mess.)

It's more MVC style - where the code comes first and
outputs HTML from templates - NOT embedded code inside HTML.

I love Ruby so much that it's very tempting to write
my new version in Ruby (mod_ruby + Apache).

But I wonder if anyone who has already done a whole
interactive website in Ruby/modruby could share their
experience with it?

Not sure what you mean by "interactive", but I have a number of sites
built with Blogtari, a web log app written in Ruby.

I've recently added support for mod_ruby, with only a few surprises.
Were there any featured you really missed or any surprise
problems? Would you recommend it for someone else?

There are a number of Ruy tools for building web sites, from simple
templating systems to "web application frameworks" (a fairly nebulous
term). There was a discussion here on ruby-talk recently about web
frameworks; search through Google groups to dig it up.

For myself, I wrote Blogtari to make frequent use of dynamic file and
class loading. It's possible, for example, to write a blog entry
preprocessor, drop it in a plugin directory, and have it automatically
located, loaded, and run when rendering the site. Blogtari also renders
blog entry source files of various file types (plain
text/pseudo-textile, email, xhtml, with support for oowriter/sxw
planned); the code loads entry rendering classes based on file
extension, so there is minimum amount of hard-coded details.

In general, Ruby's dynamic nature makes it easy to write flexible
rendering tools.
I know the question is vague, but I can't tell if I'd
be making a big mistake by trying it this way, especially
if I didn't realize until I was a month into it.

If you've already done sites in PHP, you'll likely find it easier to do
things in Ruby, assuming you think in terms of The Ruby Way.

James Britt

ruby_powered_sites = %w{
www.ruby-doc.org
www.rubyxml.com
www.jamesbritt.com
www.blogtari.com
}
 
C

Chris Pine

My tutorial is all done in Ruby:

http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/

In fact, you can see the code for it at:

http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?ShowTutorialCode=true

It's not terribly interactive, but it does actually run the example scripts
(and does the syntax coloring), capturing their output and sticking it in
the page.

Nothing too fancy; I'm pretty low-tech. :)

We are also using Ruby to build our family picture site, and we have been
loving that:

http://pine.fm/FamilyPictures/

It, too, is just one big script. As I am a Ruby programmer (and most
certainly *not* an html... uh, html-maker) I never use eruby or anything
like that for inlining ruby; I like to keep the html as out of my way as I
can.

Anyway, in both cases I have been quite pleased. Hey, it's Ruby! :)

Chris
 
S

Shashank Date

Chris Pine said:
It, too, is just one big script. As I am a Ruby programmer (and most
certainly *not* an html... uh, html-maker) I never use eruby or anything
like that for inlining ruby; I like to keep the html as out of my way as I

Take a look at dynamator: http://dynamator.sourceforge.net/

Or you may have already ;-)
-- shanko
 

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