James Duncan Davidson has an up-to-date guide for installing Rails on Mac OS X. This guide will be going into the 2nd edition of Agile Development with Rails.
The latest thinking is to use Mongrel either with, or instead of, FastCGI because it's both faster and more reliable. (Hopefully Mongrel will replace Webrick in Ruby soon.)
Locomotive is great for development, but deploying rails apps is not at all simple because of all the dependencies. I'm sure Rails will eventually cop criticism for this, and I'm surprised it hasn't been tackled by the Rails team given they're mostly Mac users (ie the 'it just works' Mac experience).
I don't expect the local development situation to be substantially improved in 10.5 either. While Rails, and the latest version of Ruby compatible with Rails, are likely to be installed, I expect some issues will remain. That is: Rails doesn't come with a Hello World style project for people to get up & running with; most tutorials assume MySQL which isn't bundled with the 10.4 client and isn't free; and Rails apps require minmal database configuration to do anything. It would be nice if 10.5 bundled the latest stable Rails (1.2.x?) an Ruby, provided a simple Hello World style web app configured to use sqllite and Mongrel.
As well, Apple haven't suggested that maintaining Rails, Ruby, sqllite, Mongrel, ruby-gems, MySQL, etc in 10.5 will be improved. For example, we haven't heard anything about Apple providing an elegant package management program to ease the pain for power users.
by Dale — Oct 18
James Duncan Davidson has an up-to-date guide for installing Rails on Mac OS X. This guide will be going into the 2nd edition of Agile Development with Rails.
The latest thinking is to use Mongrel either with, or instead of, FastCGI because it's both faster and more reliable. (Hopefully Mongrel will replace Webrick in Ruby soon.)
Locomotive is great for development, but deploying rails apps is not at all simple because of all the dependencies. I'm sure Rails will eventually cop criticism for this, and I'm surprised it hasn't been tackled by the Rails team given they're mostly Mac users (ie the 'it just works' Mac experience).
I don't expect the local development situation to be substantially improved in 10.5 either. While Rails, and the latest version of Ruby compatible with Rails, are likely to be installed, I expect some issues will remain. That is: Rails doesn't come with a Hello World style project for people to get up & running with; most tutorials assume MySQL which isn't bundled with the 10.4 client and isn't free; and Rails apps require minmal database configuration to do anything. It would be nice if 10.5 bundled the latest stable Rails (1.2.x?) an Ruby, provided a simple Hello World style web app configured to use sqllite and Mongrel.
As well, Apple haven't suggested that maintaining Rails, Ruby, sqllite, Mongrel, ruby-gems, MySQL, etc in 10.5 will be improved. For example, we haven't heard anything about Apple providing an elegant package management program to ease the pain for power users.