One of the things I learned from working with theatre, is that you should always start with the positive feedback, or some people will start crying and ultimately don’t listen to you. So here I go: I really like Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a fun language, the development process as quick as they say it is, and I love the way it forces me to best-practice behavior. And the AJAX and API features in the fresh 1.1 release also looks promising.

Although I’m a tad more skeptical towards Typo, It’s also very good. I like the AJAX-bits, and the way that it’s quite easy to hack the system beyond recognition just by making a new theme. More important: It works. I can publish my articles, you can comment, the RSS feeds work, the caching works, etc., etc. Not that I expected that it wouldn’t work, it’s just that bugs arise. In every computer system ever made. And there are not too many of them in Typo.

But this quote from the Typo mailing list in December last year may provide some context for my experiences:

[typo is] a commercially unsupported blog system that depends on a web framework that hasn’t had its official 1.0 release yet and is written in a language that a lot of hosting providers don’t support.

Even though RoR is now in version 1.1, and several hosting providers (Dreamhost, Textdrive) support it, there is still much truth to that quote. We’re still in the very early days of RoR. Here are some of the challenges I’ve encountered:

• Trying to get RoR work on Dreamhost (got much better after DH started to support it officially)
• Trying to get Typo work with my Dreamhost install of RoR (prepare yourself for adjusting some pretty obscure settings)
• Trying to update Typo to the latest version without wiping out my articles database (well, let’s just say I take a SQL dump before every update now)
• Trying to update Typo and still be able to log in to the system (well, at least people have experienced this before)
• Trying to use Typo after my host updated RoR (after a lot of angry people complained, Dreamhost reverted back to the previous version)
• Those notorious 500 Error: Rails application failed to start properly messages (they get less and less frequent. and prettier. thank god.)

What’s the bottom-line biggest problem? Documentation. In both RoR and Typo, the problem is that you have to do extensive googling every time you try to do something outside the beaten path. Even if you find someone that have had a similar problem, you can’t bet that their solution (have you tried turning it off and on? ) will help for you. My saviour has been the Typo mailing list, with it’s many very helpful people.

As I’m still quite a newcomer to the RoR scene, I’m having a hard time distinguishing what’s RoR-related errors, and what’s coming down to Typo. But I guess we all can agree that while very good, RoR is not magical. Although the first version of Typo was made in an hour, lots and lots of hours have now gone in to the project to battle spambots, database migrations, memory usage, and so on. Some more related to RoR than others.

With a growing list of not only sites, but businesses, running on RoR, it’s not fair to say that RoR isn’t ready for prime time. But I find myself recommending WordPress if my friends want to start blogging. And I find myself still choosing php at work, although I actually used RoR and Locomotive for prototyping on our current project. But one day, maybe even less than a year from now, we’ll try to make some money on Ruby on Rails.

This blogpost is also published on GAB.NET

This is the first post in Mesén Labs, the playground for the two web developers in Kulturbyrået Mesén. Here we will post pieces of code (mainly php), info about our projects and probably some longer rants. There will be some double-postings from our other sites (like styleboost.com, gab.net and mesen.com), and we think that’s a good thing.

Welcome, and please fill those comment fields with beautiful spam!

-Johan and Geir Arne