James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart)
12/2/09 7:21 PM
RT @llangit: RT @mhindsbo: #Azure supports .NET languages, such as C# + VB + Java, PHP, Python and now also Ruby http://tinyurl.com/yfs7cn6

James Urquhart from eWeek reports that Azure is now supporting Ruby on Rails.

This is exciting – you now have a major platform cloud player validating the Ruby platform.

It also shows that Microsoft is starting to behave like a “split company” – the Windows and Server business clearly not holding the web services businesses hostage.    Previous Microsoft endeavors have always had vertical integrity as a goal – Browser, OS, Office, Server, Web.  They are changing.

I’m going to start experimenting with this stuff and report back what I find.

Our friends over at Softies on Rails have put a book out that will help any .NET developer looking to work with Ruby on Rails.  The Softies crew was an early inspiration for me to try out Ruby and Mac development, and I am really happy for them that they were able to put this tome together.

The book will help new Rails developers coming from a Microsoft/closed-source world avoid pitfalls and get up to speed quickly.

My favorite:

“Viewstate is back. Now new and improved on top of Rails. acts_as_aspdotnet overrides form_tag to put a hidden variable that contains loads of crucial processing data on every postback that will fill your server pipes with more glorious bandwidth.”

If you are getting this error:

Uninitialized constant when using 1.5.8 with Rails

When running your Rails server (happens with mongrel on my setup), you’ll need to patch a file in the soap gem.

Find the file ns.rb in the soap gem. On OS X, the path should be something like this:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/lib/soap/ns.rb

At around line 19, you should be able to make the following change:

# the dudes who wrote soap4r and the rails folks are battling it out. in the meantime
# you have to apply this patch to prevent soap4r from breaking all of your other projects
# (from http://dev.ctor.org/soap4r/ticket/433)

#KNOWN_TAG = XSD::NS::KNOWN_TAG.dup.update(
#  SOAP::EnvelopeNamespace => 'env'
#)

KNOWN_TAG = {

XSD::Namespace => 'xsd', XSD::InstanceNamespace => 'xsi', SOAP::EnvelopeNamespace => 'env'

}

Viola! You are done. You should apply this to all workstations and servers that have soap4r installed. The alternative is to add:

require 'rubygems'
gem 'soap4r'

to every project that is on your workstation or server. To me, this is an untenable resolution and brings me to the community issues I mentioned above.

If you read the thread here you’ll get a good sense of the nature of the conflict in the community.

Now, I am a relatively new to the Rails scene. I’ve been impressed so far with the professionalism of the community. However, the above issue demonstrates some serious problems.. There is the possibility to completely disable production applications, or interrupt the flow of developers trying to use their local workstations with patches like this.

To start, gem developers like the good people working on soap4r need to ensure compatibility, and make sure that their installation does not essentially break working, fit applications.

This comment on the issue thread says it well:

This is a pretty serious problem for the Ruby community… anyone coming in right now trying out Ruby for the first time in an enterprise context (more likely than not by way of Rails) is going to walk away in frustration.

Beyond that though, what sort of tools can be built it to ensure compatibility? I am no gem expert, but perhaps if there were environment-wide integration tests that would be expected to pass before a gem is installed, these types of frustrating problems would not come up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ruby vs. .NET Video

Before we go forward, I assume that you have a basic understanding of Ruby and Rails. If not, read _why’s poignant guide to Ruby and buy Agile Development with Rails and run through at least the first couple of chapters.

One of the biggest challenges I had initially when starting with Rails was understanding the relationships between the web framework concepts I knew well from ASP.NET, and these new Rails concepts.

I discovered these key concepts from ASP.NET translate well into Rails:

• Master Pages
• User Web Controls
• The ASP.NET Web Control / PostBack Event Model
• The use and arrangement of .aspx, .ascx, and code-behind (.cs or .vb)

Table 1: ASP.NET Concepts and their Rails counterparts

These concepts are not exact, as these are two completely different frameworks. Let’s take a look at each of these concepts in more detail.

Master Pages and Layouts

A Master Page gives you a canvas from which you can build other pages on without having to worry about all of the common elements like headers, footers, HTML directives, etc. Rails layouts are designed for a similar purpose and as such translate very well to ASP.NET Master Pages. As you will see in the next chapter in this series, I was able to convert an ASP.NET Master Page (site.master) to a Rails layout (application.rhtml) very quickly. ASP.NET Master Pages allow for multiple discreet content replacement zones, called ContentPlaceHolders. Rails does not have a preset “tag” for zones, rather you can use variables and a single “yield” statement to render discreet sections. It is best to reserve the “yield” for the main content body, and use variables for supplementary content like headers and titles that might be replaced.

This ASP.NET Master Page:

<@Page Title="Page Title">

Lorem ipsum blah blah blah

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="headerContentPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

Ipsum lorem blah blah blah

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="bodyContentPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

is functionally equivalent to this Rails layout:

<title><%=@title || "Default Title"%></title>
Ipsum lorem blah blah blah

<%=@header_content %>

Ipsum lorem blah blah blah

<%=yield%>

User Web Controls and Partials

In ASP.NET, User Web Controls (.ascx files), give you a nice way to encapsulate common web presentation elements. They can be included on any page or template, and have their own event model that custom code can be added to, much like ASP.NET Pages. An excellent example of a User Web Control would be a “contact us” widget that allows a user to fill out and submit a contact form in a consistent way across many pages of a website.

Rails partials serve a similar purpose. They allow a developer to encapsulate HTML with the intent of reusing across many pages or layouts. The “contact us” widget example above also fits well with partials.

From the excellent overview at the Rails Diary:

Partials let you break out a chunk of RHTML that is going to be used across multiple views in a controller or even across multiple controllers.

For more information, partials API Documentation can be found here.

In the next part of the series we’ll wrap up the ASP.NET concept comparison and start to look at implementing real-world ASP.NET to Rails conversion.

I had a simple missing tag on a Master page (I think VS2005 conveniently erased my form tag because I was trying to actually do something nifty), and it blew up our company web page.

I am going to convert http://www.ltech.com to Ruby on Rails from ASP.NET 2.0 / C#.

Ltech.com is a simple site, nothing too dynamic, and with a limited number of web forms. This should provide a good case study.

Once I figure out how to post nice “code snippets” in Blogger ( or move to Mephisto or WordPress ), I’ll start posting here.

Depending on what kind of server you are deploying to, you can have any or all of the following in your mix:

Apache
Lighty (LightTPD)
Pound
Pen
Mongrel (or mongrel_cluster)
Ngnix
FastCGI

Whoa! That is way more confusing than even the most obsfucated Java stack.

I am a huge Rails fan, but I hope the community can come together with some simple production stacks that are easy and enjoyable to deploy for as Ruby is to develop in.

I’d like to know, what are you using? I am using Pound/mongrel_cluster right now, but I am looking into Ngnix.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but copy->paste into IIS directory is a whole lot easier to do.

I have already been able to install a PHP/MySql Stack (MAMP) and Drupal.

Soon, I’ll be on to Ruby.