This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Letting cooler minds prevail Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

I'm glad I held my breath for a few hours. Otherwise, I would probably have had to post another picture of a flower tomorrow. See, Patrick Peak wrote this article called Where are the Implications for "No Deploying"? in which the civilized world (Java programmers) are compared to the barbaric horde (Rails programmers).

But I'm already warming up the fumes just introducing and I promised in the title to let cooler minds prevail. First, my coworker Jamis Buck explains the deployment strategy we use at 37signals. The roughly the same approach that the 3,000 people who bought Agile Web Development with Rails already knows about — its recommended as a best practice in the Deployment chapter.

This dispels the insulting assumption that deployment in Rails is done like Patrick imagines the barbaric hordes would:

Developers deploy to a testing or production by manually zipping up the project and copying to the server. (Since there is no Ant to do it for you). Anything I'm missing here?

Heh. "Anything I'm missing here?". Right, cooler minds. Second up, Dave Thomas takes a swing at the Civilization vs Barbaric Hordes approach Patrick adopted for in "trying to understand":

I normally don’t like all these rounds of attack/defend blog posts that seem to crop up. But at the same time, I really don’t like the way that ignorance is used as a weapon. It belittles the discussion, reflects badly on the poster, and alienates communities that have a lot to learn from each other.

BTW, Patrick, did you know that the creator of Ant is working professionally with Rails? Along with lots of other high profile Java programmers. Why would you think that they would suddenly forget the importance of version control and sane deployment practices because they picked up a more agile environment?

Anyway, cooler heads.