I’ve been saying this for a while… Somehow a lot of people are getting
the impression
that Rails is magic. Ok, well, a lot of it is pretty close to magic, but
you still have to
write code. You still have to know what you’re doing. In fact, Rails
expects you to plan
out your app more than throwing together a PHP site would. And, in a lot
of ways, Ruby can
be a more confounding language to program in than many others. In other
words, there is a
learning curve just like any new technology (at least for most
people… except Derek ).
Seems unlikely to me. Rails only seems “hyped” to us because we’re
already tuned into the developer community. Apart from Slashdot the
only places I’ve seen Rails boosted are programmer’s blogs, Freenode
IRC channels, technical mailing lists, and websites like O’Reillynet -
all places I’m only looking at in the first place because I’m a
developer. And you need to be a geek of some variety even to be
reading Slashdot.
I’d be interested to know how any self-identified “non-geeks” are
found their way to Rails, and what they expect from it.
On Sunday, March 19, 2006, at 10:36 PM, Tom de Grunt wrote:
I think you’re right, however in comparison to the one-click Windows
installer, the Mac OSX installation (i.e. using Terminal) seems a
little bit unuserfriendly. We could do with a one-click installer on
Mac OSX. The subject of this discussion might as well be “Rails is
overcomplicated to install on Mac OSX”
Others have noted it on this thread, but I have written a small program
called “Locomotive” (http://locomotive.raaum.org) which is a one-click
solution to Rails development on Mac OS X. (It works just fine on
intel, and the next version will be a Universal Binary). The entire
installation and configure process for Locomotive is: 1. Download, 2.
Copy to Applications folder, 3. Run.
Now, it’s also “opinionated software”.
It doesn’t modify your system in any way, so it can’t mess up your
system in any way. If you know what you are doing and want to modify
your system, use one of the compile recipes around.
It is a development solution for OS X; it is probably not a good
choice for deployment on OS X. If you want to deploy on OS X, you’re
probably best off using one of the compile recipes.
Starting with Locomotive doesn’t bind you forever to the program. If
you start with Locomotive and find that it isn’t working out for you,
you can delete it with one easy drag to the Trash and head on down the
custom-compile road (the Rails applications you started with Locomotive
will work just fine with your shiny new custom compiled system).
).