My next project will be about handling everyone’s personal information and presenting it. I’ve already a lot of ideas for it in mind, but I probably won’t start it until I finish all the university exams. Which will probably take a month or more. Anyway, I already started gathering tools that I intend to use. Some I already used in other projects, others will be my first time and one will be more like an experiment/test.

First, the IDE. I’ve been using Eclipse for a long time now. For rails, RadRails plugin had become my favorite. Now they’ve joined the Aptana project, designed for web applications with HTML, CSS and large JavaScript support. So this is a bit of the best of the two worlds. Since both packages still weren’t combined, you’ll have to install RDT and RadRails from:

http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/

and Aptana from

http://update.aptana.com/install/3.2/

Just copy the urls into the automated install/update feature of Eclipse. More detailed instructions here.

I will also need Subclipse, a plugin for Subversion support in Ecplise. The update site url is:

http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x

Now the server. Locally I’ll use Mongrel, one of the most popular webservers for Rails, and it will probably be the webserver where the application will be deployed. The installation is very straightforward, using ruby gems:

gem install mongrel

Then you just have to run mongrel_rails start from the application root.

For deployment I’ll try Capistrano. It’s tool to automatize the deployment of rails applications. In my case I’ll use it to grab the latest version from SVN repository, upload it to the deployment server and restart webserver. It has many more advanced features but I think I won’t need more than that. You can also find more information here. The installation is again easy:

gem install capistrano

Finally, I’ll give HAML a try. It would be the first time I’ll use from the start of an application and I would like to test some factors. I want to know if it really makes my views creation faster and if after a while, the code is still maintainable and, specially, pretty. To enable HAML templates for your project just run

ruby script/plugin install http://svn.hamptoncatlin.com/haml/tags/stable

from your application root directory.

As soon as I really start using all this software on the development of my application I will share some feedback. Unfortunately I’ll not to begin coding right away, since I prefer not to have big interruptions while studding. Meanwhile, I hope Summer of Rails comes back this year. It would sure help with motivation.

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