There might just be a Silver Bullet

It is 20 years since the great Fred Brooks wrote Silver Bullet and since then we’ve managed to make the world of systems development a much more complex place without actually improving things very much. (Dave Thomas mentions that a web browser is little better than an 1970’s IBM 3270 terminal, except that the resolution is better when viewing porn).

Unfortunately having to deal with all these complexities takes development time away from solving the essential problems inherent in the application. Is there something that really takes these new pains away.

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails on and off for several months and it really does seem to help web application productivity. If you want to read why it successfully contradicts Fred Brooks assertion that there can be no more Silver Bullets, then there is an excellent article just published by 82ASK which states that Rails addresses the new problems inherent in Web application development and does it better than most.

Rails Subversion TNG

What’s wrong

I’ve never been happy with the instructions for placing a Rails application under version control with Subversion. They have always felt like a retrofit and a little unnatural.

You can get around a lot with scripting, but I just wanted it set up properly in the first place so I don’t have to worry about it.

So here IMHO is a better way of doing Subversion version control with Rails apps.

• Setting up Subversion
• Creating a New Rails application
• Using Edge and other versions of Rails
• Example Subversion Config File