Tatva-Artha

Haml is gaining popularity in Rails community. It claims higher productivity compared to defacto ERB templating. Not everybody agrees though. I see 2 short-term problem with haml.

1. ERB is similar to it pre-decessor and hence easier to learn. Compared to JSP etc. ERB is similar, you still see lots of HTML tag with interleaved ruby (or Java). Although verbose, it is closer to how your HTML would finally look like.
2. If your team has a dedicated HTML programmer (Designer as we may call them). These folks are very good at plain HTML and don’t want the trouble of converting files and having all the plumbing around when working. It is not efficient for them.

Despite this, I see Haml as valid alternative for following reasons:

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If you are a passionate ruby/rails developer, you ought to be following the discussion at rubyonrails-core. Why? because the discussion (like this) that goes on about how to fix current deficiencies are really really exciting. It not only explains what the creators of the framework had in mind when designing bits and pieces and why and why not something should be changed. Whether or not something gets accepted into the framework, it does reveal the full-truth behind the correct usability of a feature.

Great stuff. Enjoy!

Shamelessley copy/pasted this from Centostrano README… thought this would be a good reference next time I setup a slicehost slice.

  export HOSTS=<target.host.name>

  # Install Rails stack
  cap deprec:rails:install_rails_stack

  # Install mysql (if it's running on the same box)
  cap deprec:mysql:install
  cap deprec:mysql:config_gen
  cap deprec:mysql:config

  # Install your Rails app
  cap deploy:setup
  cap deploy
  cap deprec:db:create
  cap deprec:db:migrate
  cap deprec:nginx:restart
  cap deprec:mongrel:restart

I am exploring Spree for the ecommerce solution that I am working on. According to reviews, Spree is one of the most widely used RoR ecommerce package in use out there. It does have a wide community base including googlegroups and is being developed actively. However, it lacks the test coverage and documentation for how to get started and how to add extensions.

Here are a couple of issues I faced when installing:

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