why RoR ?

[Andrea]

hi there:

i m trying to help a friend evaluate why to use or not RoR in an
enterprise development, this is not a greenfield project, it s a
rewrite
scenario is that the system can be hosted as well as installed in an
intranet,so basically non devs could end up doing the install
so one of the reasons gainst is:
- is it simple to get an app up and running with an installer?
other strong reasonsagainst it:

- can the code be obfuscated (they dont want to open source it)

thoughts?

Cheers


Andrea

[Dave Rice]

It does feel simple after a long time doing it... but for a first time rails project, it might take about a month to get your deployment sorted. This book will help; http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_deploy

It's relatively easy to write an installer script, but only if you have a target platform(s).

For distributing the app you may want to check out the following;

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html

Obfuscation is not really on the cards with Rails so if it is ultimately necessary i'd look elsewhere. Anyway obfuscation is kinda pointless imho. E.g. Java .war files are just zip compressed and the source java code can be decompiled from the .jar inside them....

Best,

Dave

---

David Rice

+44 (0)78 708 12996

http://davidjrice.co.uk

[Andrea]

Cheers Dave

I ll check those links out and good point about the obfuscation

Andrea

> +44 (0)78 708 12996http://davidjrice.co.uk- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Rory Byrne]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 08:11:10AM -0700, Andrea wrote:
>
> I ll check those links out and good point about the obfuscation
>
> Andrea
>
> On May 12, 3:48 pm, Dave Rice <davidjr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > It does feel simple after a long time doing it... but for a first time  
> > rails project, it might take about a month to get your deployment  
> > sorted. This book will help;http://www.pragprog.com/titles/fr_deploy
> >
> > It's relatively easy to write an installer script, but only if you  
> > have a target platform(s).
> >
> > For distributing the app you may want to check out the following;
> >
> > http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html
> >

It might also be worthwhile for your friend to consider
deploying their application as a virtual appliance. This
way they can package up a fully configured operating system
(eg debian etch) along with all the neccessary components to
run their rails application. The customer would then just need
to run the appropriate virtualization software to handle the
container. It's a nice solution really, you can just package
up a linux container and they can run it on a windows machine
if that's their preference. Mind you, I've never tried this
stuff on windows, so I'm just assuming that it's relatively
easy.

If the customers are likely to be non-tech, then VMware is
probably a good virtualization platform to target. From a
quick glance at their site it appears that at least one of
their server solutions is free (as in beer). They also have
some sort of appliance "market-place" that might be worth a
browse (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/).

Incidentally, I'm not advocating VMware over Open Source
software. If the target customer is going to be non-tech, then
VMware is probably the safest bet. Once you've got one
container/appliance working it's trivial to make versions to
target other virtualization platforms (eg Xen, kvm, OpenVZ,
etc).

Rory

[Rory Byrne]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 07:12:44PM +0200, Rory Byrne wrote:
>
> It might also be worthwhile for your friend to consider
> deploying their application as a virtual appliance.
>

Could be licensing issues distributing your software along
with GPL'd code (a linux distro) like this. Might want to
read the following (pdf) - haven't time to read it myself,
unfortunatly:

http://www.rpath.com/corp/images/stories/Collateral/licensing_and_packaging_for_virt_appliances.pdf

There's also a wiki at rPath that should be useful on
this stuff: http://wiki.rpath.com/

Regards,

Rory

[Andrea]

Cheers for your answer thou I dont think this is a viable solution

On May 12, 7:37 pm, Rory Byrne <r...@jinsky.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 07:12:44PM +0200, Rory Byrne wrote:
>
> > It might also be worthwhile for your friend to consider
> > deploying their application as a virtual appliance.
>
> Could be licensing issues distributing your software along
> with GPL'd code (a linux distro) like this. Might want to
> read the following (pdf) - haven't time to read it myself,
> unfortunatly:
>

> http://www.rpath.com/corp/images/stories/Collateral/licensing_and_pac...

[James Kennedy]

@david

While jar files can be de-compiled - they can also be signed. This at
least makes it harder for clients to change the code. They can steel
java but then their up for copyright infringement. The real issue I'd
see with deploying on a client site with scripts is that someone might
decide to start altering the code. Then you watch your support costs
go through the roof as you try to figure out where all these
newfangled bugs are coming from.

Is there a way to sign a ruby project to guard against tampering?

J

[Dave Rice]

That's another reason why I would never put myself in this position. It makes a lot more business sense to maintain a hosted service and have a lightweight client app if you really need something on the users's computer.

An easy way to compare two copies of a dynamic language based project is;

diff -rq project/ clean_copy_of_project/ | grep -v -e '.git'

[Andrea]

sometimes a hosted service is not viable
been because thye have no internet access or beause they dont want
their business to depend on it

[Dave Rice]

Having a hosted service + thin client app that enables the client to work in an "offline" mode is part of several products i have in development. 

So yeah sometimes it's not viable... but sometimes you can have both the manageability of a hosted service with all the benefits of a local app and more.

[James Kennedy]

Something just occurred to me while hanging upside-down in the gym
(don't ask).

Why not develop in ruby and deploy to a war? I just googled 'bytecode
obfuscator' and there seem to be plenty of tools for mystifying the
war God knows - after its been written in ruby, deployed to bytecode
and then obfuscated - that should do the job. After that, you can use
the java toolset to sign the bloody thing if your that worried.

I've been using netbeans (although have reverted to TM recently) and
it has some pretty groovy support for this kind of carry on.

J

> >> +44 (0)78 708 12996http://davidjrice.co.uk-Hide quoted text -

[Andrea]

Cheers James, i ll have a look
meanwhile if you see some realted news let me know
:)

Andrea

> > >> +44 (0)78 708 12996http://davidjrice.co.uk-Hidequoted text -

>
> > >> - Show quoted text -
>
> > ---
> > David Rice

> > +44 (0)78 708 12996http://davidjrice.co.uk- Hide quoted text -