Ruby on Rails maintenance and RSpec

How are your experiences with RoR maintenance and RSpec.

• Is RSpec good for real use, I mean do developers generally use it, or is it something you can live without?

• How is with maintenance aspects of RoR, web hosting - is it cheap and abundant like say PHP hosting, gem dependencies and updates, changing the database model, etc.?

I'm researching couple of te开发者_Python百科chnologies for the next web project and RoR seems ok at a first glance, but wouldn't like to jump into something that requires a lot to maintain. Thanks.

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• Rspec is very popular but Rails creator thinks it's not that useful since there is Test::Unit, a built-in test library: http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-offended-by-rspec-debate-4610.html. Personnaly, I like Rspec and use it daily.

• Hosting Rails is really easy:

  • Heroku is quick and free until you need solid configuration
  • On a real server, once you setup Ruby, Apache and Passenger (or Nginx or whatever), you'll just have to configure your VHosts

• Deploying is dead simple thanks to Capistrano

• In general, I love Rails because everything is thought to be simple to use. Basically, the dependencies built as gems are so easy to manage thanks to Bundler.

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Rspec is definitely good for real use and most Rails developers use it a lot for their testing purposes. Generally speaking, Rails and testing are tied together. You can of course live without rspec, but testing is pretty important. You can always use test/unit, shoulda or other solutions, as long as you use something.

I would advice that you get a dedicated server for Rails or host it on Heroku. These are probably the best ways to go about it. Maintaining the projects is a whole easier than php or other choices.

Generally speaking, i highly recommend Rails :)