To whomever it may concern,

I notice the common thread here.  How to deploy typo?

There is many ways to deploy typo, the most common is

1) FastCGI. (It's also the most murky confusing documentation imo, I don't blame this on typo, I blame this on FastCGI Documentation and the people who wrote it).
2) Mongrel/Webrick
3) Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails?)

Now, there's no real difference with Mongrel/Webrick if you run nginx or Apache or lighttpd. It works, it's well documented and takes the most amount of memory (actually all of them really take the same amount of memory, you just don't see the ruby process hanging around using up 140megs of memory). Phusion Passenger... Excellent option, if you have a cheap Dreamhost.com account that is going to be your easiest option, documentation is decent and it's much easier to deploy.

So there you have it, 3 basic methods to deploy your blog. If your coding Ruby on Rails chances are this is nothing new to you, and you have no problem with it. But those who have come from the "PHP Boat" (as we'll call it, a/k/a wordpress, etc) they just untar files into a directory edit a few files, loadup their web browser and bam. It works. This is because the company behind PHP has spent a great deal of time and money at making PHP the dominant language. It doesn't make it better, or worse or anything. (It scales horribly also for those of you who are talking about scaling). Let's say you grab a Perl based blog, what's your common problem? Well mod_perl, perl with ithreads enabled. Yeah you can use it as a cgi script and have it exec perl on each page/function. But again, we'll go with it does not scale well. We have Python and django, I know have not touched any of the django software really so I won't go there.

So let's bust out some simple myths,

Rails is hard to deploy, FALSE. In fact Ruby on Rails Applications are quite easy to deploy provided your hosting company gives you an environment where it can deploy sanely. This is something that DHH has commented on a few times; there is no way to make the pain of deploying a Ruby on Rails app on a "bad/cheap hosting server" go away. Is that the fault of Ruby on Rails? or the company you chose to host with? I'll let you decide on that one.

Rails does not scale, FALSE. Ruby on Rails does Scale well if the developers write the application with scaling in mind. Put the Rails app behind a Local Traffic Manager, and inject parts of the page to be pulled from services like Akami and other various things. Look at Twitter and other Ruby on Rails based web apps. Anyone who tells you that Ruby on Rails is not enterprise ready, lied to you. Ask for your money back and tell them to get the heck out of your office.

Any questions? good great.

There is alternatives to Ruby on Rails, such as Merb (http://www.merbivore.com/ ). You can read the website about it, it's interesting, it's thread- safe and it's quite exciting. Which brings me to Featherblog (http://featherblog.org ). It's currently a work in progress and is in no way shape or fashion complete. However it's extremely fast, and will be more lightweight. One of the developers of it (eldiablo)'s web site is running feather at http://crazycool.co.uk

My single point of this post is that there is great documentation (for the most part) on how to deploy Typo, or any other Rails app. I will freely admit that the last decent version of typo in my personal opinion was typo 4.1.1. That whole Rails 2.0 version really jaded me, and now Rails 2.1 is out. Makes me more jaded, and is making me walk away from Rails as a viable option. They are throwing out more and more versions, and quite frankly I have not kept up, I need to buy the new version of Pragmatic Programmers for Rails 2... which is already out of date as 2.1 is released :(

I think the best thing I can say out of this, is if your having a problem deploying Typo (or anything else) please file a bug, write an email, give as much detail as you can. The more detail the better, so the developers of typo can find and squash the bugs. Remember, if you don't raise your voice, you don't say this is broken; you have failed the community. Just as much as you have failed the community if you fix what is broken, without reporting it and giving a patch so it can be addressed. Not everyone is a developer, not everyone can program ruby on rails. But Frédéric cannot fix a bug he is not aware of, nor can Piers.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Likens
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