9 ms·

Kickstarter: rails.app

305 points by bretthopper 15y ago

ovi256 15y ago
As Rails founding fathers complained of Java frameworks bloat, today's micro-framework fans complain of Rails bloat. Quite a cycle we've come through, isn't it ?
- tptacek 15y ago
  He's not complaining about bloat. Unlike many other high-level languages, Ruby has several viable execution environments (MRI 1.8, MRI 1.9, Rubinius, and JRuby) and Rails works on all of them. OS X ships with a system Ruby. The result seems to be that some people have trouble getting the right combination of runtime and libraries running.
  - ovi256 15y ago
    And that's my point, Rails has a lot of functionality that it provides through a lot of dependencies. Exactly the opposite of the self-contained mini-framework (if not micro-) it started as.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Your first sentence has nothing to do with my point, and your second sentence has a false premise; Rails was never a mini-framework.
    - chc 15y ago
      I don't think it's fair to characterize Rails' early accusations against Java webdev as "The frameworks are too large." They accused Java frameworks of requiring too much ceremony, repetition and verbosity, but I can't think of many instances where early Rails advocates attacked Java for having too many features.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- duaneb 15y ago
  Is rails technically a microframework? It feels absolutely massive compared to, say, Flask or web.py
  - RegEx 15y ago
    I believe that's the point ovi was trying to make.
scottshea 15y ago
Slightly ironic since I just got a MacBook for my new job and am trying to get it set up for Rails development.
- kreutz 15y ago
  https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop
- Smudge 15y ago
  ironic... or, just coincidental? i‧ro‧ny - Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. co‧in‧ci‧dence - A sequence of events that, although accidental, seems to have been planned or arranged.
  - e2daipi 15y ago
    http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony
wildster 15y ago
£25,000, how long would it take set up a repo so you could do go: sudo apt-get install rails-3.2 on Ubuntu/Debian?
- bratsche 15y ago
  Ubuntu has a rails package already, and nobody uses it. It only serves to confuse new users. Trying to mix deb and gem just hasn't worked well so far. Making a Rails.app for Mac is different though, because everything would be isolated in your .app, while a .deb would install the files to the system and track them in the package management database, so trying to modify them outside of apt-get/dpkg just b0rks everything.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Wouldn't you have to stage a coup against the Debian maintainers? Isn't Rubygems still deliberately broken there?
fieldforceapp 15y ago
How would this compare to say the BitNami RubyStack: http://bitnami.org http://bitnami.org
joshaidan 15y ago
I propose a different funding model for this project. Why not approach Rails hosting vendors like Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. to fund this project, in exchange for built-in one-click deployment to their hosting environment. Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.
- spicyj 15y ago
  Presumably they can consider the $10k sponsorship option if they want something like that.
  - joshaidan 15y ago
    Yeah, it could also be an ongoing funding partnership. My impression would be that this is something that Heroku et al would be very interested in supporting, and even developing themselves.
- lukeholder 15y ago
  There is a slot on the donar list for larger sponsors. I like this model, because the demand from the community will encourage those sponsors to participate. It would have higher risk of return if it wasn't in this public space.
- marquis 15y ago
  It would also make an ideal teaching environment: getting students to learn to navigate the Rails installation is half the challenge of getting them started.
tptacek 15y ago
I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running. Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".
- ndubya 15y ago
  I had problems installing it on older versions of OSX (Leopard), mainly because I was VERY new at managing the command line and understanding the relationships between ruby, rails, gems, etc and all of the various versions. I later got a new MBP and installing from a new install was very straight forward, but having to upgrade everything first and then installing it wasn't fun for a n00b like me. I would be interested in seeing this project as I think it would be easier for new kids on the rails block.
- joshaidan 15y ago
  I find the install even easier now thanks to RVM, which is just a copy and paste into the terminal. Same with POW, which is good for the server part of development. But then again, all this seems easy to me, can't speak for people entirely new to development.
- ajacksified 15y ago
  As a fairly recent OSX and a fairly recent Rails user, I had no trouble learning either. That is, except for Lion and XCode 4.2/4.3, which caused me about three lost days. 'rvm get head' and 'rvm install 1.9.3-head' fixed that, though.
  - ericd 15y ago
    I would say that that three lost days getting set up is a large, large problem for Rails, though.
    - ajacksified 15y ago
      Oh, absolutely - but don't confuse a Rails problem with a Ruby problem. It wasn't Rails causing problems, it was Ruby itself.
jwarzech 15y ago
I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work on it?)
- aaronbrethorst 15y ago
  He's taking time off of work to do this: https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056 https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056
  - jwarzech 15y ago
    Well I guess I should have just asked him :) At least he didn't agree to your other assumptions as to how the money will be used.
foobar2k 15y ago
3 step process: Step 1: Download the "Command line tools for Xcode" here https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action Step 2: Install homebrew with this command /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(/usr/bin/curl -fksSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contributions/install_homebrew.rb) https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contribu... Step 3: gem install rails
- baddox 15y ago
  I'm in for 10k.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 15y ago
  Yah, rather then funding a project to make Rails easier to install on OSX (because it's not with the plethora information guides and bootstrap scripts), why not tackle real problems like concurrency and websockets in Rails.
  - VeejayRampay 15y ago
    While I understand the frustration, wycats, like any other open source developer gets to pick his battles. Lowering the Rails entry bar is a good thing, making things simpler is a sign of maturity for a product. To address your bit about concurrency and websockets in Rails, people are working on the issue, see the talks given by Ilya Grigorik for example, concurrency will be coming to Rails at some point. And so will the integration with client-side framworks like Backbone or Ember. It just takes time.
    - 1qaz2wsx3edc 15y ago
      Agreed, but isn't this a good cause to fund to expatiate development. A year or two back if you ask, "how do I built my bleeding edge web application" the answer normally was 'use Rails'. My point is the Rails has been sorely lagging behind other invitations. This just feels like a waste otherwise.
- getsat 15y ago
apurvamehta 15y ago
I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady (https://github.com/joshfng/railsready https://github.com/joshfng/railsready) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu boxes and it has never been more than one click.
- VeejayRampay 15y ago
  To be fair, he said he didn't necessarily want to duplicate the effort of others. I'm sure he will garner any information he can from those projects to help make that app awesome.
DamnYuppie 15y ago
Having been a Rails developer I don't have much trouble getting Rails up and going on a system. However I do have several friends who seem to have no end of trouble getting theirs setup working reliably. Given they are not full time developers, but they complain about how hard it is to get everything configured so I can see how useful something like this can be for many people looking to try out Rails.
- varikin 15y ago
  I agree. I have been thinking about a shell script to setup a Django dev environment for my coworkers when needed, mainly the frontend developer because they are not familiar with or have many of the tools I take for granted. This idea is rather brilliant. It would be nice the app could open or setup a sublime text or textmate project for an app as well.
benatkin 15y ago
It has a link to Yehuda's profile in the sidebar, where it shows that he's funded two KickStarter projects. One of them is this: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-client-for-mac-os-x/comments http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-c... Why shouldn't this turn out the same way? The person who started the HubCap project is a prolific open source contributor. I'm glad he didn't drop everything else to work on HubCap, as he made many great contributions to API client development last year. I hope Yehuda changes his mind about this sooner rather than later. I really like seeing what Yehuda comes up with and this doesn't interest me at all. I use the command line, and I recommend homebrew to anyone on OS X who's serious about learning ruby, and so far it hasn't failed me. I've seen the Google App Engine launcher and I think it's pretty good but I still prefer the command-line tools.
driverdan 15y ago
If there's someone I'd trust to do a project like this through Kickstarter it's Yehuda. And since his time isn't cheap I understand the $25,000 price tag. To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the same, possibly taking a little longer?
lukeholder 15y ago
Seems like this is connected to rails 4 release: sidebar: "and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers."
- wycats 15y ago
  The main link to Rails 4 is that we've announced that Rails 4 will drop Ruby 1.8.7 support, which means that some sort of install will be mandatory on OSX beginning with Rails 4.
  - lukeholder 15y ago
    of course... didn't think of that.
  - lukeholder 15y ago
    also, I would LOVE to contribute to the GUI design. Let me know... lukemh -at- gmail
ashconnor 15y ago
I used this guide: http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby-mac http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby... when getting started, which was pretty painless. There's also a GUI for RVM called Jewelry Box which makes handling gem sets and ruby versions easy: http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox I think the money would be better spent on creating a comprehensive beginners guide since the 4th edition of Agile Web Development with Rails is lacking.
gauravk92 15y ago
Setting up a vagrant script would be worth more. Portable development environment (Ubuntu running in a virtual box), cross platform support, easily configurable and duplicatable, and segregated from host machine. You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't deal with that, use vagrant. P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that with whatever he's going to do.
wh-uws 15y ago
What about on a virtual private server like at linode? Then one doesn't necessarily have to shell out for a Mac to run osx. I would be much more interested in that.
- RegEx 15y ago
  If you're interested, I have a rails template with extensive documentation on setting it up on a server from scratch. https://github.com/Hack56/Rails-Template/wiki https://github.com/Hack56/Rails-Template/wiki
  - wh-uws 15y ago
    Thanks alot im getting ready to redo an old wordpress multiuser site in rails and I was having trouble learning how to configure it
egypturnash 15y ago
oh god yes please I am a rails n00b who tried fooling with Rails a couple weeks ago and found the installation process INTENSELY FRUSTRATING. Especially compared to the unthinking ease of MAMP. Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications (and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible. pledges ten bucks
- larrywright 15y ago
  "Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible" I don't mean to sound condescending, but if you're interested in using Rails (or any similar web platform), you need to be comfortable with the command line. It's not hard to learn, and there's even a good Peepcode video called "Meet the Command Line" that serves as a gentle introduction. If you're really adamant about staying away from the terminal, you should look elsewhere.
iamgilesbowkett 15y ago
I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/ The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.' If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money. Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-) Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before. (If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.) Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance: https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack https://github.com/joshfng/railsready https://github.com/joshfng/railsready So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard! I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read http://railstutorial.com/ http://railstutorial.com/ But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter: http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/185134250050334720 http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472... Step 1: make Rails hard Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy Step 3: PROFIT
- cletus 15y ago
  Joel Spolsky [1] beat XKCD to that punch by several years: > (By the way, for those of you who follow the arcane but politically-charged world of blog syndication feed formats, you can see the same thing happening over there. RSS became fragmented with several different versions, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting, and the attempt to clean everything up by creating yet another format called Atom has resulted in several different versions of RSS plus one version of Atom, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting. When you try to unify two opposing forces by creating a third alternative, you just end up with three opposing forces. You haven't unified anything and you haven't really fixed anything.) [1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 15y ago
PLEDGE $100 OR MORE The previous rewards, plus access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. This feels awkward. Paying for this seems very much unlike the OSS model. Not that I'm complaining, but it threw me off a bit.
eblume 15y ago
I decided to learn Rails this week, and just went through the process of following http://railstutorial.com http://railstutorial.com (actually I'm about half through it.) The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two, and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow, following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby. I, for one, do not see the need for this.
uptown 15y ago
If someone won't make the effort to learn how to get an environment up and running, what makes him think that environment will have any real user once it's ready? There's a certain value of the commitment one takes when they decide to push forward and figure things out necessary to proceed.
blhack 15y ago
Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now? What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the privilege of reading the mailing list for an open source project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to start it? Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network. Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was. Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't want to start working until they scale it. Stop this. This is really bad. [1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers. What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"? What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?
- ceol 15y ago
  > We're charging a cover at the door now? It's like charging a cover at the door to help write the songs for the band you want to hear.
- tptacek 15y ago
  What this is is Yehuda Katz, who has built a reputation with contributions to open source products over many years, realizing that his market value is better than "kudos" on some website. The alternative to stuff like this is Yehuda Katz writing code for some startup that you will never see. Here's Katz finding a way to make a business out of writing open source... ... and this is a bad thing? What's wrong with you?
  - nikcub 15y ago
    Lots of companies hire people to work on open source projects. It is how most of it gets written. He could probably get a job where working on this is part of it in a heartbeat. (not that I disagree with this project or method, I think he should do the same as what Google Appengine does with its installer - it is seriously awesome)
moe 15y ago
As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it. Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies. The hard part is installing the exact same Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact same Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them. In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be harmful, just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself. I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that. If you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything. For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...
- sanderjd 15y ago
  As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here are completely different. Your problem definitely exists, and lots of people are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong. Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.
tigris 15y ago
I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production environment.
- Androsynth 15y ago
  Just drag the app to the Applications folder, duh
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  Seemingly everyone just does git push to heroku and that's been heralded as the best thing ever, so people don't have to futz with all the server setup/management. But with regards to people looking for similar ease of use on the desktop for local development, they're all blithering idiots who shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer because they don't understand the intricacies of rvm vs rbenv. There seems a bit of a disconnect here. Most people are proud of all the hard-won knowledge (sometimes through months or years of experience), and feel that everyone else should have to go through similar hell to attain some magic level of guru-ness. But... don't take away my heroku account!
- deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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dustinrodrigues 15y ago
I think that installing and configuring a database like Postgres or MySQL would be useful since it's often a non-trivial step in getting a production app ready (e.g. for Heroku).
ryan-allen 15y ago
I think crowd sourcing is a great idea. Being a professional programmer doesn't mean doing it for 120 hours a week. I'm more than happy to throw a little bit of money at something like this to have a good job be done of it. Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame. I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25 to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is: * I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself. * It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves. * Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from. This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to focus on this and I can't wait for the result.
ignorethat 15y ago
I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was. And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that: 1. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work. 2. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are not new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing. But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails. Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development and scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.
tferris 15y ago
I don't know. There are many good observations about what happened to Rails the last years in the comments. Rails is complicated and to get fluent in Rails takes some time. But this complexity came with a great flexibility. And that's a sign that we are facing a phenomenal ecosystem. I admit starting rails is frustrating, so many new concepts but everything like rvm has a reason why and even beginners will realize this quickly. Yehuda's approach reminds me of the early days of webdevelopment where you could install a WAMP stack with one click on your windows systems. I never liked those one-click-installers—you don't know what happens to your system and deinstalling was a nightmare with still running db servers somewhere for years. You can't wipe away Rails complicated entry with such an one click-installer. After you installed Rails with one click things aren't getting easier your still have to figure out next steps and which frameworks to choose (i.e. ERB or HAML, SCSS or LESS, MySQL or Postgre, etc.). Or something breaks within rvm: with an yehuda's approach you are completely clueless because you don't know anything about rvm, gemsets because the installer did all the work for you. Sometimes there is even too much magic in Rails. I am still wondering if ActiveRecord is too much abstraction and if there are better more direct ORMs like DataMapper, I am used to ActiveRecord but still I can not fluently create data models, there's always something I forget, using the plural or singular, saving the updated migration, rolling back the migration, etc. Otherwise it's far beyond any ORM from other Frameworks I have ever seen in terms of speed. And its usage in Ruby is very consistent. Also Rails shell commands are very consistent, once you understand the rails syntax (like rails generate or destroy something you can quickly build anything in minutes), I tried several times to find something similar with python/django but there the entries seemed to me even more complicated, don't follow any system and felt restricted, i.e. Django's automatic Backend (no offense, i know not enough about django and python to say anything serious but that was just my first impression). Another last great example of Rails: once you managed to install Rails, just put haml, less, less-bootstrap-rails and simple_form in your gemfile and run bundle. with this setup you can build web apps in minutes with perfect design and they are fully customizable. some years ago you needed hours or days to get to similar results. It takes time to get there but once you are there you have the power. this pace and variety in the rails ecosystem comes from so many talented people who contribute. trying to set one standard for how things are done would slow down this pace. finally, I think that Yehuda doesn't want to raise money, he just wants to get attention and the approval that he had the right idea.
shapeshed 15y ago
OSS development has to be funded somewhere and to date it has been the benevolence of bigger organisations that have awarded grants or developer time. This gives the opportunity for a developer to offer to solve a problem and for the community to vote with their pockets. It empowers developers and the community to get behind a problem space and if people don't want it it won't happen.
ramblerman 15y ago
Im all for opening doors to newbies, and I think udacity and coursera are leading the way in that regard. But if people desire to become programmers is it really that bad to have them come in contact with a little bit of configuration and head scratching.
rmc 15y ago
This would be brilliant way to fund new open source work. ☺
headius 15y ago
JRuby will be in GSoC, and may also have a separate "summer of code" via an as-yet-unnamed benefactor. Perhaps we should just get Yehuda to mentor a student to build a single "Rails.app" that runs on all platforms, rather than just OS X? http://jruby.org/gsoc http://jruby.org/gsoc
jasonlotito 15y ago
As it wasn't mentioned, anyone have any idea of the license he'll be releasing this under?
methoddk 15y ago
Installing Rails on OSX is trivial. If one really needs this process streamlined, maybe you shouldn't be coding? Or maybe you should just stop using a computer? Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front page that has no business here. I thought this was hacker news. Seems more like "check out my super cool project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(
billsix 15y ago
So did DHH give permission to use the Rails logo for this project????? "The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case, you're on the way to lose your trademark. So I only grant promotional use for products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution." http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-to-use-of-rails-logo-567.html http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-t...

305 points by bretthopper 15y ago

As Rails founding fathers complained of Java frameworks bloat, today's micro-framework fans complain of Rails bloat. Quite a cycle we've come through, isn't it ?

tptacek 15y ago
He's not complaining about bloat. Unlike many other high-level languages, Ruby has several viable execution environments (MRI 1.8, MRI 1.9, Rubinius, and JRuby) and Rails works on all of them. OS X ships with a system Ruby. The result seems to be that some people have trouble getting the right combination of runtime and libraries running.
- ovi256 15y ago
  And that's my point, Rails has a lot of functionality that it provides through a lot of dependencies. Exactly the opposite of the self-contained mini-framework (if not micro-) it started as.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Your first sentence has nothing to do with my point, and your second sentence has a false premise; Rails was never a mini-framework.
  - chc 15y ago
    I don't think it's fair to characterize Rails' early accusations against Java webdev as "The frameworks are too large." They accused Java frameworks of requiring too much ceremony, repetition and verbosity, but I can't think of many instances where early Rails advocates attacked Java for having too many features.
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duaneb 15y ago
Is rails technically a microframework? It feels absolutely massive compared to, say, Flask or web.py
- RegEx 15y ago
  I believe that's the point ovi was trying to make.

scottshea 15y ago

Slightly ironic since I just got a MacBook for my new job and am trying to get it set up for Rails development.

kreutz 15y ago
https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop
Smudge 15y ago
ironic... or, just coincidental? i‧ro‧ny - Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. co‧in‧ci‧dence - A sequence of events that, although accidental, seems to have been planned or arranged.
- e2daipi 15y ago
  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony

wildster 15y ago

£25,000, how long would it take set up a repo so you could do go: sudo apt-get install rails-3.2 on Ubuntu/Debian?

bratsche 15y ago
Ubuntu has a rails package already, and nobody uses it. It only serves to confuse new users. Trying to mix deb and gem just hasn't worked well so far. Making a Rails.app for Mac is different though, because everything would be isolated in your .app, while a .deb would install the files to the system and track them in the package management database, so trying to modify them outside of apt-get/dpkg just b0rks everything.
tptacek 15y ago
Wouldn't you have to stage a coup against the Debian maintainers? Isn't Rubygems still deliberately broken there?

fieldforceapp 15y ago

How would this compare to say the BitNami RubyStack: http://bitnami.org http://bitnami.org

joshaidan 15y ago

I propose a different funding model for this project. Why not approach Rails hosting vendors like Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. to fund this project, in exchange for built-in one-click deployment to their hosting environment. Would be a win-win for the user and hosting provider.

spicyj 15y ago
Presumably they can consider the $10k sponsorship option if they want something like that.
- joshaidan 15y ago
  Yeah, it could also be an ongoing funding partnership. My impression would be that this is something that Heroku et al would be very interested in supporting, and even developing themselves.
lukeholder 15y ago
There is a slot on the donar list for larger sponsors. I like this model, because the demand from the community will encourage those sponsors to participate. It would have higher risk of return if it wasn't in this public space.
marquis 15y ago
It would also make an ideal teaching environment: getting students to learn to navigate the Rails installation is half the challenge of getting them started.

tptacek 15y ago

I'm interested in whatever Yehuda Katz comes up with, but I've been a Rails dev at a Mac shop since 2007? and I have never been too frustrated by getting Rails running. Does anyone here have specific problems? From my experience, it really has been a matter of "gem update --system; gem install rails".

ndubya 15y ago
I had problems installing it on older versions of OSX (Leopard), mainly because I was VERY new at managing the command line and understanding the relationships between ruby, rails, gems, etc and all of the various versions. I later got a new MBP and installing from a new install was very straight forward, but having to upgrade everything first and then installing it wasn't fun for a n00b like me. I would be interested in seeing this project as I think it would be easier for new kids on the rails block.
joshaidan 15y ago
I find the install even easier now thanks to RVM, which is just a copy and paste into the terminal. Same with POW, which is good for the server part of development. But then again, all this seems easy to me, can't speak for people entirely new to development.
ajacksified 15y ago
As a fairly recent OSX and a fairly recent Rails user, I had no trouble learning either. That is, except for Lion and XCode 4.2/4.3, which caused me about three lost days. 'rvm get head' and 'rvm install 1.9.3-head' fixed that, though.
- ericd 15y ago
  I would say that that three lost days getting set up is a large, large problem for Rails, though.
  - ajacksified 15y ago
    Oh, absolutely - but don't confuse a Rails problem with a Ruby problem. It wasn't Rails causing problems, it was Ruby itself.

jwarzech 15y ago

I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work on it?)

aaronbrethorst 15y ago
He's taking time off of work to do this: https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056 https://twitter.com/#!/wycats/status/185113407429677056
- jwarzech 15y ago
  Well I guess I should have just asked him :) At least he didn't agree to your other assumptions as to how the money will be used.

foobar2k 15y ago

3 step process: Step 1: Download the "Command line tools for Xcode" here https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action Step 2: Install homebrew with this command /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(/usr/bin/curl -fksSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contributions/install_homebrew.rb) https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/master/Library/Contribu... Step 3: gem install rails

baddox 15y ago
I'm in for 10k.
1qaz2wsx3edc 15y ago
Yah, rather then funding a project to make Rails easier to install on OSX (because it's not with the plethora information guides and bootstrap scripts), why not tackle real problems like concurrency and websockets in Rails.
- VeejayRampay 15y ago
  While I understand the frustration, wycats, like any other open source developer gets to pick his battles. Lowering the Rails entry bar is a good thing, making things simpler is a sign of maturity for a product. To address your bit about concurrency and websockets in Rails, people are working on the issue, see the talks given by Ilya Grigorik for example, concurrency will be coming to Rails at some point. And so will the integration with client-side framworks like Backbone or Ember. It just takes time.
  - 1qaz2wsx3edc 15y ago
    Agreed, but isn't this a good cause to fund to expatiate development. A year or two back if you ask, "how do I built my bleeding edge web application" the answer normally was 'use Rails'. My point is the Rails has been sorely lagging behind other invitations. This just feels like a waste otherwise.
getsat 15y ago

apurvamehta 15y ago

I feel like this is overkill. I have been using RailsReady (https://github.com/joshfng/railsready https://github.com/joshfng/railsready) to setup several Mac and Ubuntu boxes and it has never been more than one click.

VeejayRampay 15y ago
To be fair, he said he didn't necessarily want to duplicate the effort of others. I'm sure he will garner any information he can from those projects to help make that app awesome.

DamnYuppie 15y ago

Having been a Rails developer I don't have much trouble getting Rails up and going on a system. However I do have several friends who seem to have no end of trouble getting theirs setup working reliably. Given they are not full time developers, but they complain about how hard it is to get everything configured so I can see how useful something like this can be for many people looking to try out Rails.

varikin 15y ago
I agree. I have been thinking about a shell script to setup a Django dev environment for my coworkers when needed, mainly the frontend developer because they are not familiar with or have many of the tools I take for granted. This idea is rather brilliant. It would be nice the app could open or setup a sublime text or textmate project for an app as well.

benatkin 15y ago

It has a link to Yehuda's profile in the sidebar, where it shows that he's funded two KickStarter projects. One of them is this: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-client-for-mac-os-x/comments http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sferik/hubcap-a-github-c... Why shouldn't this turn out the same way? The person who started the HubCap project is a prolific open source contributor. I'm glad he didn't drop everything else to work on HubCap, as he made many great contributions to API client development last year. I hope Yehuda changes his mind about this sooner rather than later. I really like seeing what Yehuda comes up with and this doesn't interest me at all. I use the command line, and I recommend homebrew to anyone on OS X who's serious about learning ruby, and so far it hasn't failed me. I've seen the Google App Engine launcher and I think it's pretty good but I still prefer the command-line tools.

driverdan 15y ago

If there's someone I'd trust to do a project like this through Kickstarter it's Yehuda. And since his time isn't cheap I understand the $25,000 price tag. To me the elephant in the room is simply would people do this for free like most open source? The Rails community is large and dedicated. If the core team started this as an official Rails project would the result be at least the same, possibly taking a little longer?

lukeholder 15y ago

Seems like this is connected to rails 4 release: sidebar: "and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers."

wycats 15y ago
The main link to Rails 4 is that we've announced that Rails 4 will drop Ruby 1.8.7 support, which means that some sort of install will be mandatory on OSX beginning with Rails 4.
- lukeholder 15y ago
  of course... didn't think of that.
- lukeholder 15y ago
  also, I would LOVE to contribute to the GUI design. Let me know... lukemh -at- gmail

ashconnor 15y ago

I used this guide: http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby-mac http://pragmaticstudio.com/blog/2010/9/23/install-rails-ruby... when getting started, which was pretty painless. There's also a GUI for RVM called Jewelry Box which makes handling gem sets and ruby versions easy: http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox I think the money would be better spent on creating a comprehensive beginners guide since the 4th edition of Agile Web Development with Rails is lacking.

gauravk92 15y ago

Setting up a vagrant script would be worth more. Portable development environment (Ubuntu running in a virtual box), cross platform support, easily configurable and duplicatable, and segregated from host machine. You never know what kind of things people are doing on their machines, don't deal with that, use vagrant. P.S. I'm sure a rails script exists for vagrant so he could just improve that with whatever he's going to do.

wh-uws 15y ago

What about on a virtual private server like at linode? Then one doesn't necessarily have to shell out for a Mac to run osx. I would be much more interested in that.

RegEx 15y ago
If you're interested, I have a rails template with extensive documentation on setting it up on a server from scratch. https://github.com/Hack56/Rails-Template/wiki https://github.com/Hack56/Rails-Template/wiki
- wh-uws 15y ago
  Thanks alot im getting ready to redo an old wordpress multiuser site in rails and I was having trouble learning how to configure it

egypturnash 15y ago

oh god yes please I am a rails n00b who tried fooling with Rails a couple weeks ago and found the installation process INTENSELY FRUSTRATING. Especially compared to the unthinking ease of MAMP. Gimme one .app and a directory structure I can just throw into /Applications (and later throw away if my experiments come to naught), gimme a nice control panel to stop and start Rails. Let me get it up and running on my system without hassling with the Terminal. Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible. pledges ten bucks

larrywright 15y ago
"Because I really really avoid the Terminal as much as possible" I don't mean to sound condescending, but if you're interested in using Rails (or any similar web platform), you need to be comfortable with the command line. It's not hard to learn, and there's even a good Peepcode video called "Meet the Command Line" that serves as a gentle introduction. If you're really adamant about staying away from the terminal, you should look elsewhere.

iamgilesbowkett 15y ago

I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/ The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.' If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money. Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-) Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before. (If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.) Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance: https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack https://github.com/joshfng/railsready https://github.com/joshfng/railsready So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard! I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read http://railstutorial.com/ http://railstutorial.com/ But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter: http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/185134250050334720 http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472... Step 1: make Rails hard Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy Step 3: PROFIT

cletus 15y ago
Joel Spolsky [1] beat XKCD to that punch by several years: > (By the way, for those of you who follow the arcane but politically-charged world of blog syndication feed formats, you can see the same thing happening over there. RSS became fragmented with several different versions, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting, and the attempt to clean everything up by creating yet another format called Atom has resulted in several different versions of RSS plus one version of Atom, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting. When you try to unify two opposing forces by creating a third alternative, you just end up with three opposing forces. You haven't unified anything and you haven't really fixed anything.) [1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

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icebraining 15y ago

PLEDGE $100 OR MORE The previous rewards, plus access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. This feels awkward. Paying for this seems very much unlike the OSS model. Not that I'm complaining, but it threw me off a bit.

eblume 15y ago

I decided to learn Rails this week, and just went through the process of following http://railstutorial.com http://railstutorial.com (actually I'm about half through it.) The tutorial made it extremely easy. I was up in running in an hour or two, and it only took that long because I am taking it rather obsessively slow, following all reference links, and brand new to Ruby. I, for one, do not see the need for this.

uptown 15y ago

If someone won't make the effort to learn how to get an environment up and running, what makes him think that environment will have any real user once it's ready? There's a certain value of the commitment one takes when they decide to push forward and figure things out necessary to proceed.

blhack 15y ago

Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now? What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the privilege of reading the mailing list for an open source project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to start it? Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't? What if MySQL didn't properly manage their prize levels? Now it's "I want to build an alternative social network. Bootstrap me with $200,000" or whatever that was. Kickstarter is really cool for a lot of things, I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects (burning man), but now every hacker I know has got a $25,000 wall in front of them called "kickstarter" and they don't want to start working until they scale it. Stop this. This is really bad. [1]: From the page: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers. What the hell is this? I have to buy a ticket to "help steer the project"? What happened to community? We're charging a cover at the door now?

ceol 15y ago
> We're charging a cover at the door now? It's like charging a cover at the door to help write the songs for the band you want to hear.
tptacek 15y ago
What this is is Yehuda Katz, who has built a reputation with contributions to open source products over many years, realizing that his market value is better than "kudos" on some website. The alternative to stuff like this is Yehuda Katz writing code for some startup that you will never see. Here's Katz finding a way to make a business out of writing open source... ... and this is a bad thing? What's wrong with you?
- nikcub 15y ago
  Lots of companies hire people to work on open source projects. It is how most of it gets written. He could probably get a job where working on this is part of it in a heartbeat. (not that I disagree with this project or method, I think he should do the same as what Google Appengine does with its installer - it is seriously awesome)

moe 15y ago

As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it. Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies. The hard part is installing the exact same Rails on multiple Macs and deploying the exact same Rails to production servers that are not Macs. And when I say "Rails" then I mean the entire dependency chain which reaches far beyond Rails and Mysql. The hard part is having controlled service startup/shutdown scripts that work locally and across any number of servers in your production deployment. The hard part is configuration management and safely toggling dev/production/staging modes across all involved services. There's lots of hard parts; bootstrapping a vanilla rails is not one of them. In fact: Naive bootstrapping can be harmful, just like the still virulent code-generator brain-rot in rails itself. I make a living managing these things and have evolved multiple approaches ranging from chef/puppet, over canonical git-repositories that work cross-platform, to VMs. There is no one-size-fits-all once your stack outgrows Rails+MySQL, and it always outgrows that. If you wanted to solve the real problems surrounding all this then a single-platform bootstrapper is nowhere near cutting anything. For that you'd have to start writing a better chef/puppet, which are indeed more than ripe to be superseded. But this is far beyond the scope of a kickstarter project and I hope Yehuda will rather keep his focus on Ember...

sanderjd 15y ago
As you pointed out, your problem and the problem he is trying to solve here are completely different. Your problem definitely exists, and lots of people are working hard on solving it, whether that means those working on improving chef and puppet themselves, or on other less flashy configuration management systems, or on new projects that are attempting to improve on the existing solutions in a more fundamental way. Presumably Yehuda is simply less interested in contributing to that work than in trying to solve this other unrelated problem. You may argue that this problem does not exist, but the many articles decrying how hard rails has become and the competing projects that are also working on this suggest that you are wrong. Also, it's way more than 5 shell commands and even if it were only 5 it would be worthwhile to make it easier.

tigris 15y ago

I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production environment.

Androsynth 15y ago
Just drag the app to the Applications folder, duh
mgkimsal 15y ago
Seemingly everyone just does git push to heroku and that's been heralded as the best thing ever, so people don't have to futz with all the server setup/management. But with regards to people looking for similar ease of use on the desktop for local development, they're all blithering idiots who shouldn't be allowed to touch a computer because they don't understand the intricacies of rvm vs rbenv. There seems a bit of a disconnect here. Most people are proud of all the hard-won knowledge (sometimes through months or years of experience), and feel that everyone else should have to go through similar hell to attain some magic level of guru-ness. But... don't take away my heroku account!
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dustinrodrigues 15y ago

I think that installing and configuring a database like Postgres or MySQL would be useful since it's often a non-trivial step in getting a production app ready (e.g. for Heroku).

ryan-allen 15y ago

I think crowd sourcing is a great idea. Being a professional programmer doesn't mean doing it for 120 hours a week. I'm more than happy to throw a little bit of money at something like this to have a good job be done of it. Open source is amazing! But people have to eat. If people with great ideas and the ability to execute have to pull a contracting gig to pay their rent which takes away from important side-projects, I think that's a shame. I'd like to see more things like this. If it means more high quality open source that helps people and saves them time, then great! I have donated $25 to this project. The direct impact it will have on me when it's complete is: * I will be able to get designers/front-end developers up and running on a reliable rails setup without much hassle to myself. * It's very likely they'll be able to set it up themselves. * Programmers from other environments might be playing with Rails in 10 minutes on a weekend, enough to whet an appetite that will potentially give us a broader pool of developers to hire from. This is great! Crowdsourcing is great! I hope he raises the cash required to focus on this and I can't wait for the result.

ignorethat 15y ago

I tried the locomotive solution back in the day and there was a reason it died. It sucked. Installing Rails was not the problem. Learning it was. And again, the problem with Rails 3 today isn't the install. Instead it's that: 1. There is a shit-ton of old Ruby/Rails documentation out there that confuses the living shit out of people, and this is a duck-typed language, which is fine, but it means that people are even less likely to know what the fuck is going on when the code they are trying to use from someone's blog doesn't work. 2. Most of those using Ruby on Rails are not new as they once were, so since the majority know a little more about what the fuck they are doing, they are less likely to write things for those that don't know what the fuck they are doing. But, writing an .app won't solve that. Instead, spend that time trying to take bundler, Gemfiles, rvm, the more complex Rails directory structure, asset pipeline, etc. and simplify the whole damn thing to create Rails 4, and chalk 3 up to an oops. A lot of the changes in Rails 3 were warranted, but the additional complexity will drive people away, and that is against the soul and original intent of Rails. Want something that people would be really interested in? A framework that makes both development and scaling EASY. Development was easy with Rails years ago, but scaling was nearly impossible because that wasn't the intent. Now people scale Rails, but it is still hard, and development has gotten much harder. That's bad, because there are already ways to learn to develop quickly, and other solutions for scaling well. Being halfass at both is a sure way to fail miserably over the long-term, and Ruby and Rails is awesome; it shouldn't fail like this.

tferris 15y ago

I don't know. There are many good observations about what happened to Rails the last years in the comments. Rails is complicated and to get fluent in Rails takes some time. But this complexity came with a great flexibility. And that's a sign that we are facing a phenomenal ecosystem. I admit starting rails is frustrating, so many new concepts but everything like rvm has a reason why and even beginners will realize this quickly. Yehuda's approach reminds me of the early days of webdevelopment where you could install a WAMP stack with one click on your windows systems. I never liked those one-click-installers—you don't know what happens to your system and deinstalling was a nightmare with still running db servers somewhere for years. You can't wipe away Rails complicated entry with such an one click-installer. After you installed Rails with one click things aren't getting easier your still have to figure out next steps and which frameworks to choose (i.e. ERB or HAML, SCSS or LESS, MySQL or Postgre, etc.). Or something breaks within rvm: with an yehuda's approach you are completely clueless because you don't know anything about rvm, gemsets because the installer did all the work for you. Sometimes there is even too much magic in Rails. I am still wondering if ActiveRecord is too much abstraction and if there are better more direct ORMs like DataMapper, I am used to ActiveRecord but still I can not fluently create data models, there's always something I forget, using the plural or singular, saving the updated migration, rolling back the migration, etc. Otherwise it's far beyond any ORM from other Frameworks I have ever seen in terms of speed. And its usage in Ruby is very consistent. Also Rails shell commands are very consistent, once you understand the rails syntax (like rails generate or destroy something you can quickly build anything in minutes), I tried several times to find something similar with python/django but there the entries seemed to me even more complicated, don't follow any system and felt restricted, i.e. Django's automatic Backend (no offense, i know not enough about django and python to say anything serious but that was just my first impression). Another last great example of Rails: once you managed to install Rails, just put haml, less, less-bootstrap-rails and simple_form in your gemfile and run bundle. with this setup you can build web apps in minutes with perfect design and they are fully customizable. some years ago you needed hours or days to get to similar results. It takes time to get there but once you are there you have the power. this pace and variety in the rails ecosystem comes from so many talented people who contribute. trying to set one standard for how things are done would slow down this pace. finally, I think that Yehuda doesn't want to raise money, he just wants to get attention and the approval that he had the right idea.

shapeshed 15y ago

OSS development has to be funded somewhere and to date it has been the benevolence of bigger organisations that have awarded grants or developer time. This gives the opportunity for a developer to offer to solve a problem and for the community to vote with their pockets. It empowers developers and the community to get behind a problem space and if people don't want it it won't happen.

ramblerman 15y ago

Im all for opening doors to newbies, and I think udacity and coursera are leading the way in that regard. But if people desire to become programmers is it really that bad to have them come in contact with a little bit of configuration and head scratching.

rmc 15y ago

This would be brilliant way to fund new open source work. ☺

headius 15y ago

JRuby will be in GSoC, and may also have a separate "summer of code" via an as-yet-unnamed benefactor. Perhaps we should just get Yehuda to mentor a student to build a single "Rails.app" that runs on all platforms, rather than just OS X? http://jruby.org/gsoc http://jruby.org/gsoc

jasonlotito 15y ago

As it wasn't mentioned, anyone have any idea of the license he'll be releasing this under?

methoddk 15y ago

Installing Rails on OSX is trivial. If one really needs this process streamlined, maybe you shouldn't be coding? Or maybe you should just stop using a computer? Similar to the Svbtle drama, this is yet another post lingering on the front page that has no business here. I thought this was hacker news. Seems more like "check out my super cool project that you can't use unless you're awesome or you pay me" news. :(

billsix 15y ago

So did DHH give permission to use the Rails logo for this project????? "The use of the logo is restricted as it always is when talking about a trademark. When the logo is used in a commercial setting, such as part of the promotion of a book, it legally requires that the trademark holder has been involved and stands behind the quality of the book. If that's not the case, you're on the way to lose your trademark. So I only grant promotional use for products I'm directly involved with. Such as books that I've been part of the development process for or conferences where I have a say in the execution." http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-to-use-of-rails-logo-567.html http://www.rubyinside.com/david-heinemeier-hansson-says-no-t...