Developing Large Scale Web Application (with Ruby on Rails)

My talk on Aprill 6th 2012 at Chennai.rb conference in System Insights, Chennai.

Cloud Foundry is a Game Changer

When Rails came out, deploying it was a pain. particularly if you were from PHP world where you need to FTP your app to the server and that’s it. There were many books and blogs written about deploying your Rails app and the pain it gave also gave pleasure to hackers who have the thrill of doing something different.

Then came companies like Engine Yard which primarily consisted of deployment experts. They charged a premium but got the things done. Heroku was an still is another welcome addition, it allowed any app developer to deploy an app with just a few lines of typing on your console. At last deployment was easy.

Heroku took on the problem of scaling well. All you need to do is crank up the bars in your dashboard sol that you get more CPU power! That’s it!!! To a PHP guy like me that was a miracle.

There is however one nagging problem, Heroku or Dot Cloud or many other cloud service providers run our code on a proprietary platform, we do not know what goes behind their iron curtain and all we get from them is assurance that our app will be safe. Its here where cloud foundry stands.

Cloud foundry provides a cloud infrastructure that’s open source. Since its open, if you don’t like cloud foundry’s service, you cloud simply download their cloud software, take a backup of your app, set up your own clod and get your app running.

Currently the major challenge in cloud hosting is how you move your app from cloud to cloud. Almost all the proprietary clouds are not interoperable or you simply can’t move your app from one cloud provide to another with ease. But since Cloud  Foundry is open any cloud operator can host it, and since the environment is the same you can move your app from one cloud foundry provider to another.

If you are a app developer having your app in Heroku or some thing else, just take a look at cloud foundry website http://www.cloudfoundry.com/ . You may escape from the shackling of proprietary software.

Instant Apps on Openhift

Instant Apps on Openhift

Open shift, the open source cloud platform, competitor to Heroku, releases instant apps which would pull out a repository from githib and run it on Openshift platform.

Twitter Bootstrap problem in Heroku

I encountered a problem while using twitter boot strap in Rails, that too hosting with Heroku. Especially while using twitter bootstrap rails gem , all would work fine on my local machine, but when I upload the app  to heroku, it would throw an error as the boot strap’s less file messes up with some thing and does not compile properly.  Well how to avoid this?

The simplest answer is to download the files from twitter site using this link http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/download.html#download and put them in your public folder for your rails application to use it.

The second option is to precompile your assets and upload it to heroku. To know how to precompile assets visit this link https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3x-asset-pipeline-cedar

Hopefully you will be able to resolve the issues you face in deployment.