Ever since the word about it got out, ajax started to surface everywhere. From blog engines to content management systems, to general websites to everywhere (it seems). And most people still haven’t realized Ajax won’t cook you breakfast, it won’t save the world, and more importantly, it will not fix all your problems.

Ajax is good. Ajax allows you to process events without breaking the interaction chain with a page reload. However, the technology itself (it can’t be stressed enough) is based on old concepts, that have been around for ages. It is not your new flash, even though most people seem to believe it could be.

I can almost see every new so-called engineer and “web designer” pitching the idea of ajax to their potential new and excited clients: “ajax will make your webpage behave like a desktop application”. In fact, tell you what, why don’t you add “just like a mac” to the bullshit? Because deep down, you know what you’re talking about is fundamentally crap. Or at least, you should know that. (more…)

Its been a long time since I’ve posted about development in the true sense of the word because I’ve been focusing on getting ideas on the web 2.0 and the business side of things around the blog. However, I have some good news.

Even though its not official yet, Dreamhost now fully supports Ruby on Rails with FastCGI. This is great. I had previously emailed their tech support department about supporting the web application framework on shared hosting solutions and was told it was almost done. Well, it is now - good job!

I usually don’t plug this sort of thing, but not actually having to change hosts in order to get some of my latest rails-projects online is quite good. I’ll investigate further how to implement projects on their hosting accounts and post about it tomorrow. Now back to the regular program.

Rael Dornfest, the CTO at O’Reilly, has a pretty good writeup on Ruby on Rails and Ajax that you should probably look at if you’re (still) sceptical about switching from you usual PHP approach to web development or other frameworks like Struts. Many others including OSS’s own Bruce Perens, have claimed RoR to be the productivity boost the web needed, so even if you aren’t considering moving, make sure you have a look at it.

If you’ve seen my post on setting up Ruby on Rails using darwinports on OSX, you probably know what I’m about to describe. If you didn’t, this is an explanation of the steps required to install FastCGI in order to speed-up processing RubyOnRails when using apache. This installation is much easier and faster than the one mentioned on RoR’s docs.

This assumes you’ve completed the steps in the other post.

* Install fcgi: sudo port install fcgi
* Install mod_fastcgi: sudo port install mod_fastcgi
* Install ruby’s fcgi bindings: sudo gem install fcgi
* Load fastCGI on your apache: LoadModule fastcgi_module modules/mod_fastcgi.so
* Add the .fcgi handler:

    FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/
    AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

Now all you have to do is restart apache (sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart) and you’re done. You still have to edit your rails apps to use fastCGI instead of mod_ruby, though, with the two steps described on RoR’s documentation.