Checking the water by diving right in

Like many people, I learn by doing, so rather than reading on, I decided to install Rails and see how it goes.

The environment is a virtualized Kubuntu installation with 768MB RAM. Probably not enough for serious work, but good to play with. And if when I manage to *seriously* hoark things up (not an unknown occurrence for me), I can start over with little impact on my actual dev environment.

So I installed RubyGems, Rails, Mongrel and a couple other little things (OpenSSL, LibC, etc). Long and the short of it is that it just worked. In very little time, I got Rails installed, created an app, started Mongrel and brought up the start page.

Just to compare- because lets face it, that's what I'm doing here- the first time I installed ColdFusion was a nightmare. Now, that's not an overly fair comparison. ColdFusion 4.5 wasn't a well-polished product, install-wise. IMO. And I didn't know all that much about what I was doing back then.

A better comparison would be installing CF as an Ear/War with JRun. The first time I tried that, it took an entire weekend and I managed to completely bork my CF installation twice over that period of time. Once so badly that IIS would no longer serve *anything*. Not even .html files.

I also did a little reading on making a Mongrel cluster- similar in principle to making a cluster of JRun servers and connecting them to your front webserver for performance. Good to know that I don't have to give up that ability.

I'm impressed, I gotta say.