Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Posted by David August 07, 2006 @ 09:14 PM
It’s finally official: Ruby on Rails will ship with the next version of OS X (see “Internet and Web”). Both server and client (on the developer DVD). We’ve been working with Apple for quite a while to make this happen and its great to finally be able to share it with the world. The love for Ruby has definitely spread inside Apple and we’ve been thrilled to see the level of interest they’ve taken to get OS X to be a premiere development and deployment platform for Rails.
The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.
It’s been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by the Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running on Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.
Thanks so much to Ernest Prabhakar, Jordan Hubbard, and Dave Morin for making this happen.
I just wonder how this will be set up really. I kinda expected this to happen ever since Apple fixed the Ruby version on MacOS. And I have been wodering how the setup will really be. Will there be just normal Ruby, RubyGems and the Rails gem preinstalled and you update it yourself. Or will we have to worry about manually updating Rails because the next MacOS security update or 10.5.2 release will update in some other way.
There are pros and cons with both ways. Updating manually gives you a little more power over the setup. But using the software update to update Rails gives you assurances that a remote server is running a specific version.
So David. Can you be a bit more specific on the setup or is it still all a bit hush hush and Apple’y?
Question #1… Why wasn’t Apple at RailsConf !?
That seemed like a no-brainer. Instead, they let IBM steal their fire !
I presume this obsoletes Locomotive? Hopefully there’s a really easy way to get PostgreSQL setup and running, like there is with MySQL using Locomotive.
That’s crazy-cool. Will you be utilizing the standard gems so that it’ll be easy to upgrade Rails later on?
wow… just… wow.
That’s a big win for you guys—congrats!
Can we expect another cover story in Linux Journal?
Amazing! Well done.
One word: WHOOOHOOO!!!
A question, though… I wonder if there will be any more robust Apache management tools with it than there are now. Vhost management and all of that stuff is still very much done through config files and command line.
Impressive! Congratulations guys.
Rails will be installed through RubyGems. So updating Rails will be as easy as “gem update”. They’re really, really getting it. And we’re working with them to ensure all the details get right.
Congrats guys. This is really incredible.
Congratulations. Just don’t forget those of us running Windows and Linux. :-)
Does anyone have any information about XCode 3.0 support for Ruby and Rails coding?
Happy B-Day and Congrats!
I’m with Brittain – please don’t forget us Windows and Linux users.
Making headway in the small to medium enterprise (non design) space requires we play nicely with that OS from Redmond.
Maybe you can you get MS to include Rails with Vista. :)
Wow, that’s freakin awesome!
Just brilliant! This is a great accomplishment for sure :-)
Congrats to DHH and the rest of the core team!
Wow. Really, really great !!!
Especially if just running a gem update will work well, and update all your gems smoothly.
And this is a call to the Ruby community … Why just have a Windows, or Unix/Linux options when installing gems like FXRuby or MySQL native driver ? I dream for the day I’ll get Mac OSX on the list and be able to install them without any compilation. That will make the world even better !
I must be an idiot b/c I don’t understand what Ruby on Rails client is (or maybe that’s OS X Leopard Client, in which case I still don’t understand).
Great news though, hoping this means my fixnum problems will go away too.
Fantastic news. Congratulations!
Justin, OS X ships in a client version (what you get on a mac[book]) and a server version (what you get on an xserve). Rails is included with both versions.
DHH, thanks. I never thought to call OS X on my macbook a client OS until now :)
That’s kind of alarming… all of the Rails core team uses OS X? I mean, there are very littl Rails aps actually deployed on OS X, right? Shouldn’t there be a little less apple monoculture?
mike – they all use OS X for development. They use largely linux for deployment, I believe. Thus, there’s plenty of testing on both (and FreeBSD as well, I think). They probably do plenty of testing on that awful Redmond OS, too.
@mike – “all of the Rails core team uses OS X? I mean, there are very littl Rails aps actually deployed on OS X, right?”
Most deployments are on Linux servers and DHH and other Rails core members have first hand experience with this deployment process so its definitely not a monoculture.
The deployment and maintanence of the production systems will give them all the input they need to make any non-Apple specific bug fixes. And lets not forget that anyone can submit a bug or a patch to the Rails Trac system (whether those users are on Mac, Windows, Linux or whatever else Rails runs on) so it becomes even less of an issue.
Congratulations. Great achievment.
Hopefully a smoothly compiled RMagick is also included. (but I’m not expecting it.)
Very exciting. I’ve been pushing this via Bug Reporter/Radar for a very long time now. Good to see it coming to fruition.
Railing to the sky!
Will be RoR then next RedHat?
Railing to the sky!
Will be RoR then next RedHat?
Will rails also ship with the desktop version of Leopard or only the server version?
Great!
One more reason for me to get a Mac as soon as Leopard and a new revision of iMac are released.
Fantastic news!
Congratulations David and your core developer team. And Happy Birthday, Rails!
Hmmmm, all hype and no substance. Apple and ROR are made for each other.
Railing to the sky!
Will be RoR then next RedHat?
Congratulations! Another big big result for the core team… and for the users!
Congratulation to the Rails Team. You deserve this! It may not have much impact in terms of user count, but i feel it’s like a “Ritterschlag” from Apple to you (Ritterschlag is german, I don’t know the proper term in english. It’s the ceremony where the queen/king tips on the shoulder of a new knight to make him feel how heavy that sword is…;-) )
Great recognition. Congrats to the core team. As topfuny said, I hope they include some of the ‘not so easy’ to install gems such as rmagick.
It’s the ceremony where the queen/king tips on the shoulder of a new knight to make him feel how heavy that sword is..
Knighting.
Is it just me or does dhh use the word vast/vastly very much?
I’m don’t follow apple news that much, and I just want to ask those who do if there will be new macbook pros with the core 2 duo cpus coming this year.
It sounds neat, but what’s the actual benefit?
Hardcore ROR developers won’t use the installed one, because it’s going to be the version that shipped with the OS, not the latest version.
And if you’re a user installing an app, either the entire installation will be trivial (drag-n-drop, click checkbox), or you’ll have to install packages by hand, anyway.
So yeay, congrats, but it seems like mostly a symbolic victory to me.
What’s non-orientable and lives in the sea? Mobious Reeb….
Seriously though, I live to code Ruby and code Ruby to live.
By the time you’ve coded one line, I’ve already coded ten; You code in exponential time and I’m big-O of log(n).
-reetee
great news for rails! now, i need to buy myself a macbook pro… i just neeed to know when leopard is coming out
@K
Ever heard of “gem update”?
And what the hell is a ‘Hardcore ROR developer’. Get over it mate, whoever they are, they are going to appreciate it working out if the box if they know what’s good for them.
The bitter medicine of proprietary software really isn’t much tastier when shipped with various pieces of sweet Free software.
It’s kind of sad that you let Apple profit from your free software. And act like it’s a good thing.
(People that want Rails know where to get it.)
Bugsy- expect the Macbook Pro revision in October, soon as Intel supplies Core 2s in bulk.
K- one benefit is that people like me, a Mac use who had never heard of RoR, follows links in the Mac news and on Wiki, comes looking at this site, and is interested… cos the tech is going to be on their Leopard CD, and of course geeky Mac users (involved in web development, for example) like to know all about that stuff and how we can use it.
So thanks, you guys, for all your work.
Yes very nice but when apple has to make somthing like a calender server they use python ;-)
Rockway – It is still free and mac is not profiting. they are not charging more because it comes with ruby and it is free advertisement and support for Rails. Also, Rails has not lost its right. It is a sweet deal for Open Source! Windows would never do this. “Think about it”.
Time to learn RoR!!! PHP is getting killed off slowly!
@grrrr
Python is a great language, no doubt about it. And I even think it’s good for more than just calendar servers. :-)
But Rails is revolutionizing web apps. While I still think it’s a longshot that Ruby will become a dominant language, I think that all web frameworks from this point forward, in any language, are going to be heavily influenced by Rails.
It’s nice that Apple is shipping Rails, but what about performance? I’d love to deploy on an Xserve but most of the real-world benchmarks I’ve seen suggest that OS X has some network and disk I/O bottlenecks. I’d be interested in seeing some new numbers for Rails on the Intel Xserves before I go telling clients to drop US$3K+ on shiny Apple hardware.
Even though I use Linux not Mac, I consider this very good news. I wonder if it’s possible to get Ubuntu to include Rails in their next version, or at least to include Ruby and RubyGems in the default Ubuntu installation. Currently RubyGems even in the repositories and has to be built from scratch.
What about the wiki on Mac. Is it instiki based?
Sorry—I think I wrote “on rails” instead of “on Lepoard”
While this is great for an official Rails outbreak, unless it’s pre configured to run on apache, it’s not very useful on OS X Server.
Let’s face it, installing rails/mongrel is trivial. It’s configuring Apache/FastCGI that’s been the show stopper, at least for me, on OS X Server. I installed Debian on some of my xserves for this reason.
Al3x:
The “G5 XServe has terrible bottlenecks” FUD is both well-refuted and seemingly obsolete even if at one time accurate (note 64-bit x86).
Compiling for Darwin, and awareness of what Darwin system calls actually do, should address most issues. If Apple’s price comparison with Dell is accurate, Apple’s server is also quite a bit more affordable than the one Dell sells.
One advantage to MacIntel: you are free to run any OS you like (that supports EFI or will run in BootCamp).
Fantastic ! Awesome !
Thank you so much to you David and core team
One more thing,
APPLE you rock !!!
That’s fantastic news. Nice to see some recognition from within Apple. I hope Apple beefs up their Software Update functionality so that Ruby and Rails stays up to date too… that’d be the icing on the cake.
Does this mean rMagick will work now? Will that come out of my spotted ‘Leopard’ box too? Does this mean my rake deploy scripts won’t return errors that appear meaningless and yeild no search results? What about Lighty? Will PC users start un-installing their JDKs?
What does this all mean — really?
rails and ruby support within xcode 3 ??
Re: all the posts about getting RedHat or Ubuntu or whomever to include it by default—that would be great, but why not create a simple and focused distro just for serving Ruby on Rails? We could use the Rock Linux distro creator. Anyone interested in working on this with me, contact me. My e-mail address is firstnamemiddlename@(apple’s e-mail service domain).com , where my middle name is “drew”.
This is indeed good news. I’m glad that Rails (and Ruby) is getting the recognition it deserves.
Brandon Z, there’s already something like what you’re proposing. It’s a Live CD based on Mandrake and comes with Rails preinstalled and some other related goodies:
http://www.railslivecd.org/
@hangon.
xcode actually has fine Ruby support. I use xcode when playing around with RubyCocoa. However. One problem is that xcode doesn’t really think in directory structure. So importing a Rails application into xcode is a very unhappy thing to do. But I seriously doubt that they will make such drastic changes to xcode to satisfy RoR developers and leave the old objC developers out in the cold. :)
This is great. I am deploying on OS X and I will feel even better about this when I am running a vendor supported config. As a startup person wearing multiple hats, I do not have the resources (or mental space) to support 3 or 4 operating systems. An all Apple environment works for me.
Also, for others who are out there reading, one of the most cost effective solutions for hosting your own hardware is to host a Mac Mini. The core duo’s are simply fabulous and very cheap to host due to their low space/power/cooling requirements. (macminicolo)
Just like JDK that come with Mac, I am impressed on the Strategy that Apple did to market this Great Operating System.
Amazing!!!!