Hey guys, In an attempt to try and do something constructive for the community I looked into installing Radiant on the free Heroku account ("Blossom" + 1 dyno = $0 -- sweet). The results and ease of deployment were surprising. For the test I used the "roasters" bootstrap site that comes with Radiant. Check it out: http://young-fog-92.heroku.com/ Have a play with the admin interface: http://young-fog-92.heroku.com/admin user: oneclick pass: oneclick To me, seeing as it is running on a completely free account, that site is working pretty nicely. I followed these instructions to get it up and running: http://tr.im/mDSb There were a few hiccups along the way which, thankfully, were fixable. The Heroku guys are putting some effort into Windows compatibility for their client gems, although there are a few glitches still. See here (and my comment on there): http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/?p=92 Overall, the fact that you can get a Rack-based app up and running quickly, easily and for free on Heroku without all of the hassles of servers and suchlike is *huge*. Part of what made PHP so massive was that drag-and-drop ease of deployment. Then there''s the fact that you don''t have to freeze gems into your app; you just supply a .gems manifest instead and the gems get installed for you natively. For my test push of Radiant, this worked flawlessly. http://docs.heroku.com/gems So all of this goodness combines to make an experience that would be really appealing to Windows-based Rubyists. Install Ruby with the OCI, then have an app deployed and running in the net in minutes. That''s a pretty cool experience to be offering potential Ruby users. So that''s why I think some sort of sponsorship from Heroku would be a perfect match. Should I ask them if they''re interested? Charles
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Charles Roper <reachme at charlesroper.co.uk> wrote:> Hey guys, >Hi Charles,> In an attempt to try and do something constructive for the community I > looked into installing Radiant on the free Heroku account ("Blossom" + 1 > dyno = $0 -- sweet). > > The results and ease of deployment were surprising. For the test I used the > "roasters" bootstrap site that comes with Radiant. Check it out: > > [...]Awesome stuff!> There were a few hiccups along the way which, thankfully, were fixable. The > Heroku guys are putting some effort into Windows compatibility for their > client gems, although there are a few glitches still. See here (and my > comment on there): > > http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/?p=92 >One of the glitches with Heroku is not Heroku itself but json. I''ll really great someone contact the json gem author and make him upgrade the gem to use rake-compiler, so native binaries can be distributed (hint hint)> Overall, the fact that you can get a Rack-based app up and running quickly, > easily and for free on Heroku without all of the hassles of servers and > suchlike is *huge*. Part of what made PHP so massive was that drag-and-drop > ease of deployment.Yeah, couldn''t be much simpler, I mean, instant staging environment to test things out.> > Then there''s the fact that you don''t have to freeze gems into your app; you > just supply a .gems manifest instead and the gems get installed for you > natively. For my test push of Radiant, this worked flawlessly. > > http://docs.heroku.com/gems >That is even more awesome!> So all of this goodness combines to make an experience that would be really > appealing to Windows-based Rubyists. Install Ruby with the OCI, then have an > app deployed and running in the net in minutes. That''s a pretty cool > experience to be offering potential Ruby users. >Indeed it is.> So that''s why I think some sort of sponsorship from Heroku would be a > perfect match. > > Should I ask them if they''re interested? >Yeah, for sure! The website is going to be a Radiant application, a few images and outsource video embeds, so no need to get a huge server :-)> CharlesThank you Charles for your feedback and willingness to contribute back. You have proven your point about Heroku :-) Regards, -- Luis Lavena AREA 17 - Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exup?ry
Luis Lavena wrote:> One of the glitches with Heroku is not Heroku itself but json. > > I''ll really great someone contact the json gem author and make him > upgrade the gem to use rake-compiler, so native binaries can be > distributed (hint hint)Hehe, I contanted Florian, the author, and he got back sounding a little confused saying he was already using rake-compiler. Turns out, JSON 1.1.6 is working fine on Windows (mingw32 and mswin32). Look: C:\Ruby18\bin>gem install json Building native extensions. This could take a while... Successfully installed json-1.1.6 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for json-1.1.6... No definition for cState_configure No definition for cState_configure Installing RDoc documentation for json-1.1.6... No definition for cState_configure No definition for cState_configure C:\Ruby18\bin>gem install heroku Successfully installed heroku-0.9.2 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for heroku-0.9.2... Installing RDoc documentation for heroku-0.9.2... C:\Ruby18\bin>gem list --local *** LOCAL GEMS *** configuration (0.0.5) heroku (0.9.2) json (1.1.6) launchy (0.3.3) rake (0.8.7) rest-client (0.9.2) C:\Ruby18\bin>ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2009-03-31 patchlevel 368) [i386-mingw32] C:\Ruby18\bin>gem list --local *** LOCAL GEMS *** configuration (0.0.5) heroku (0.9.2) json (1.1.6) launchy (0.3.3) rake (0.8.7) rest-client (0.9.2) --- How would he go about providing a native mingw extension?>> So that''s why I think some sort of sponsorship from Heroku would be a >> perfect match. >> >> Should I ask them if they''re interested?> >> Yeah, for sure!I''ve asked Pedro, the dev for the heroku gem for a contact. Hopefully they''ll be interested, if not, no harm done. :) BTW, what is the canonical way of detecting for Windows these days? Is it like this? RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin32|mingw32/ Cheers, Charles
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Charles Roper <reachme at charlesroper.co.uk> wrote:> Luis Lavena wrote: >> >> One of the glitches with Heroku is not Heroku itself but json. >> >> I''ll really great someone contact the json gem author and make him >> upgrade the gem to use rake-compiler, so native binaries can be >> distributed (hint hint) > > Hehe, I contanted Florian, the author, and he got back sounding a little > confused saying he was already using rake-compiler. Turns out, JSON 1.1.6 is > working fine on Windows (mingw32 and mswin32). Look: >Awesome! added to the list of gems using rake-compiler: http://wiki.github.com/luislavena/rake-compiler/projects-using-rake-compiler> [...] > > How would he go about providing a native mingw extension? >In version 0.5.0 of rake-compiler he can target both mingw32 and mswin32. Exact documentation for now: http://github.com/luislavena/rake-compiler/commit/166800107d24fa41474c1dc0a93df238f16563df> > BTW, what is the canonical way of detecting for Windows these days? Is it > like this? > > RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin32|mingw32/ >Yes: /mingw|mswin/ The "32" part should be avoided, since there is mswin64_90 version (VC9) and also mingw64 (which need to get it properly working).> Cheers, > CharlesCheers and thank you for all the administrative effort getting in touch with json author, -- Luis Lavena AREA 17 - Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exup?ry