Days of discoveries
For some reasons I’ve recently moved my ass in some code projects instead of moving my body as the last part got a bit too painfull to do. I’ve catched up on some stuff and I’m really happy about it.
Sinatra
I’ve played with the mighty, classy, Sinatra in the past already but never to the extent to build what one could designate as a full website.
This time I went on to build a modular platform for some needs with one big sinatra app, a smaller one, and a simple Ruby script in a third corner. On the big one I decided to go with DataMapper to get another feeling about ORMs. On the other ones I didn’t need a db since I opted to rely on communication with the main hub.
And it’s great. Of course I need to do a bit low level stuff compared to RubyOnRails but the overall feeling is nice, really.
Around it
I also pushed Thor a bit more to do some tasks handling in the sinatra apps.
For the html part I decided to use Bootstrap the new kid on the block and found that with haml it made my life much easier. Having worked hours with Jquery recently I managed to get even more happy with the design part.
Chef
For a long time, some of my little elven friends at the GCU Magic Garden were talking about puppet and some got even famous for articles about it like @____nico.
So since I needed something to handle managing servers I decided to go for it, but for some reasons, it was not puppet that I tried first, it was Chef. I went a bit mad about it at first part because of my low IQ and a tad bit because I receive marketing emails from opscode.
Yet, @____nico was kind enough to spend some time to explain puppet and chef to me and discuss which one could be a better choice for me, and then if mcollective could help me too. In his opinion chef could be a better fit, I’m not at the point where I can say that, but I’m quite happy that, after a day I managed to get it running and working for something real.
Capistrano
In between Sinatra and Chef I took time to read, test and use Capistrano the tool to deploy web applications. Which turned out to be quite nice too. Thanks to @joelazemar for the help to get started (check this).
After Jquery it’s the second thing I went from “no never” to “ok lets see, oooh nice”.
Some great discoveries indeed, and hopefully it’s not finished.
