The Rails Myths

I'm an Ops guy who just happens to write a lot of code, rather than a coder who happens to handle Ops, and I can testify that Rails is not fun to manage, from an Ops perspective.<p>Setting up a tightly version-controlled, centralized deployment for a full Rails app stack is more difficult than doing the same with J2EE, but this is partially due to the immaturity of the platform -- Ruby, and Rails, just haven't been in the mainstream for anywhere near as long as Java has.

By coincidence, I was up until 2 last night getting a Passenger install to work. I'm deploying multiple apps to this new server I'm setting up and didn't want to install gems globally (Rails' version of DLL hell) and had all sorts of fun with freezing Rails and gems, and getting Capistrano to work.<p>And, yes, Passenger made this whole process easier than it was when I did this with Mongrels. It's still not simple and easy.

We build a small, versioned depot of ruby + rails and other gems. Running this with Apache/mod_fcgid works really well and is very stable.