Question

How are your experiences with RoR maintenance and RSpec.

• Is RSpec good for real use, I mean do developers generally use it, or is it something you can live without?

• How is with maintenance aspects of RoR, web hosting – is it cheap and abundant like say PHP hosting, gem dependencies and updates, changing the database model, etc.?

I’m researching couple of technologies for the next web project and RoR seems ok at a first glance, but wouldn’t like to jump into something that requires a lot to maintain. Thanks.

Answer 1

• Rspec is very popular but Rails creator thinks it’s not that useful since there is Test::Unit, a built-in test library: http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-offended-by-rspec-debate-4610.html. Personnaly, I like Rspec and use it daily.

• Hosting Rails is really easy:

  • Heroku is quick and free until you need solid configuration
  • On a real server, once you setup Ruby, Apache and Passenger (or Nginx or whatever), you’ll just have to configure your VHosts

• Deploying is dead simple thanks to Capistrano

• In general, I love Rails because everything is thought to be simple to use. Basically, the dependencies built as gems are so easy to manage thanks to Bundler.