Getting Into Rails
Posted October 2nd, 2006 @ 07:31pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm thinking of starting a small online "middle-man" shop. I would take orders, charge customers, and then buy from a company that doesn't sell to individuals and they'd create and drop-ship the product.
I'm thinking of hosting the site with TextDrive and using Ruby on Rails to power the site. I'd have to learn RoR, of course, but I've already bought Agile Web Development with Rails and will be digging in to that book tomorrow. My Cocoa/C/C++/PHP/JavaScript/BASIC/etc. knowledge should come in handy, of course.
Justin Williams, who is writing a beginner's book on Ruby on Rails, recommended two useful tools to me: Shovel and PayPal Libraries for Ruby and Rails. I'm thinking of using PayPal to handle authorizations, though I may wade into the world of authorize.net if I can be convinced of the benefits over PayPal.
Anyway, that's about all I have to say on that. I don't have any questions, though I do welcome comments and thoughts on the subject.
Donate Life
Posted 02 Oct 2006 at 7:59pm #
I've been with TextDrive for about a year, and have been fairly happy with their service. If it weren't for me buying my own server and having a nice (read free) place to colocate it, I'd probably be staying with them for a while.
That being said, I have begun to see some performance issues over the last few months (I'm on Bidwell). With the increasing size of my project (and Rails trunk), I'm finding that I can easily break through their memory limit. I've started seeing lots of people going with VPS solutions, but cost is usually the limiting factor there.
Best of luck with your new venture!
Posted 02 Oct 2006 at 9:21pm #
For my own knowledge (later), an open-source Rails shopping cart is here and was "dugg" here.
Posted 03 Oct 2006 at 10:23am #
Welcome to the rails! Rails is a wonderful platform, but I can't recommend TextDrive for hosting (see my blog post here). I had ton of reliability issues with them, and I have since moved on. RailsMachine and rimuhosting are much better solutions. They're more expensive as they are VPS's, but, as DeLynn mentioned, many people in the rails community have been moving VPS's because of instability in virtual hosting.