I’ve been evaluating a few on-line collaboration tools built on Rails.  The most recent one I’ve looked into is ProjectLounge Lite.  It’s completely open source so I decided to give it a run on OS X.  Since I was unable to download a zip file I decided to checkout the project using Subversion.  Unfortunately I didn’t have Subversion installed on my Mac so I had to dig around for it.  I didn’t want to deal with compiling from source and was able to find this binary installer from Martin Ott.

After downloading, I simply executed the .pkg file and the necessary files were installed to /usr/local/bin.  I then created a symbolic link so that Subversion would exist in my path:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/svn /usr/bin/svn

This enabled me to checkout the Rails project using the following command:

svn checkout svn://svn.projectlounge.com/open/light

I was able to successfully grab the latest version of code and run it on my local dev box.  This whole process took about 10 minutes and would have taken much longer if I had to compile from source.  Sometimes I like to get under the hood, but as I grow older (and lazier) I like for things to be simple and “just work”.

I can’t neglect the fact that none of this would have been possible without the open source community.  I’m certain that Martin as well as the Project Lounge team have put a tremendous amount of effort into their projects.  Kudos to all for making my life easier!

If you’re looking to develop applications centered around mapping then check out Google’s enterprise mapping solution. It’s really no different than the standard developer API other than the fact that it’s not free and the licensing terms are different (you still use the same developer API). This means that you can integrate Google maps in your business application whether you charge for custom development or a monthly service fee. I spoke with a Google rep last week and their pricing is very competive, even cheaper than a lot of the mapping providers out there.

Zach recently posted a comment about configuring Rails to work with FastCGI on GoDaddy servers.  By default GoDaddy has Rails configured to work with standard CGI, which is drastically slower than FastCGI.  After using the tips Zach posted I was able to get FastCGI running and now the performance of the app is incredible.

Here are a couple of tips to get you up and running:

1. Change the following in app/public/.htaccess from RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L] to RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

2. Update the first line of app/public/dispatch.fcgi from #!/usr/bin/ruby to #!/usr/local/bin/ruby and make sure the permissions on the file are set to executable

The difference is night and day.  Give it a go and see the difference between the two.

This is just a random tidbit, but I thought it was pretty cool.  I’m not sure if this is a hidden easter egg or actual functionality.  I was recently working in Eclipse and after an interesting keyboard sequence I was typing from right to left.  No matter what I typed within the current document it was displayed backwards.  I thought it was something buggy with memory consumption, but it turns out that none of my other files were behaving the same.  After I closed the offending document and opened it back up everything was back to normal.  Check out the screen below to see the goods.

I’ve added a few posts talking about the shortcomings of GoDaddy’s Rails configuration. While most of the issues I’ve dealt with are acceptable, there’s one that’s not. I recently contacted GoDaddy about having my Rails app live in the webroot. This means that users would be able to access this via http://mydomain.com. It turns out that Godaddy DOES NOT support Rails applications that live in the webroot. Therefore the app would live in a subdirectory and look something like http://www.mydomain.com/myapp/.

While that seems like a minor detail I think it’s one that should not be overlooked. In certain instances web applications need user friendly URLs and not something that’s difficult to remember. At least that’s what I firmly believe. Since GoDaddy is going for the mass market when it comes to domain registrations and web hosting I don’t see them specializing in Rails hosting. That’s too bad. Once I get my current Rails app up and fully functioning I’m going to switch to a host that specializes in Rails hosting, such as TextDrive.