Tag : ruby

Which is “better” for developing web apps – Ruby or PHP? I recently saw a question on LinkedIn which inspired me to add my two cents to the discussion…

The key difference in the languages (Ruby vs. PHP) are the level of “object-orientation,” and (obviously) syntax. Ruby was designed from the start (~1993) to be an object-oriented language (EVERYTHING is an object) while PHP was, until recently (v5.0 – 2004), a procedural language (an example would be PHP v4.x’s use of the class name as a method for initialization vs. PHP 5.x’s use of __construct). As a ...

I noticed a lot of people searching for a way to delete all installed ruby gems and finding my Painless Cleanup of Ruby Gems With Similar Names page. I added this page for those of you who want to delete all installed gems instead of just cleaning them up.

Listing all gems is easy: gem list

OK, we can list our gems, but how do we delete them all? My list looks something like this:

abstract (1.0.0)
actionmailer (2.2.2, 2.1.2, 2.1.1, 2.1.0, 2.0.2, 1.3.6)
actionpack (2 ...

I have been riding the bleeding edge of Merb and Datamapper for about seven or eight months. Whenever the source was updated at Github , I would pull in the changes, rebuild, then reinstall the gems. There was a time when the Merb and Datamapper contributors were bumping versions regularly and I was having problems with versions interfering with each other. I wanted only the latest and greatest gems installed.

Luckily Merb gems all start with ‘merb’ and Datamapper gems all start with ‘dm’. All I needed to do was write a shell command which lists all gems beginning with ‘merb ...

I am working on a Rails application using Apache and Mongrel on a Linux (Fedora Core) box. I want to be able to rotate the Rails logs to prevent them from taking up too much disk space. I found a number of blog posts / articles which had complicated(ish) directions to halt the mongrels, move (rename) log files, and then restart the mongrels. I knew there had to be a simpler way to handle this using the operating system. After much searching I ran into this blog post by Mike Mangino: Log Rotation with Mongrel.

I use Vlad the Deployer ...