Heroku and Hobo ROCK!
Monday, March 15, 2010
It’s been too long since I posted here. A new job takes up a lot of my spare brain cycles. I’m doing a lot of python work at the Albany, NY office of solutionset where I am a Database Integration Engineer. A great place to work, but keeps me hopping.
Since I last wrote about Heroku a great deal has changed: They are out of beta and the deployment process is now so slick that it is almost an implementation of the “DWIM” operator, do what I mean. It is a painless, user-friendly way to deploy ruby-based apps including Sinatra and Merb as well as standard Rails apps. Take a look at Heroku if you have not looked at it in a while.
I recently revisited Hobo which is a CRUD scaffolding framework for Rails. Except it is CRUD on steroids! They just released version 1.0 and I like it very well. It lets you get a standard database-driven Rails site going very quickly and appears to have the flexibility to take you pretty far down the road of building nice apps. Other similar frameworks I have looked at seem to fall short once you start pushing them.
Hobo gives you user authentication and object life cycle management for free. The clearest example of life cycle management is how the user model defines the states a user should pass through from guest to registered status. This kind of state logic can be applied to any Model and then you can limit or modify controller actions based on the object’s state.
A last recommendation for rvm, the ruby version manager. This lets you install multiple versions of ruby and associated sets of gems. Makes testing your app against different versions of ruby much easier.
That’s all for now!
Until next time,
Tom Porter