It Isn't "Zero Deploy"

Patrick Peak has written up an article with his thoughts after attending a presentation by David Geary about Rails. In the presentation David said that Rails was “zero deploy time”.

The quote is misleading, and Patrick was mislead. Rails is not zero deploy, it’s “zero compile”. The difference is that you can edit a file in development and reload your browser to get the changes – there’s no intermediate compilation. The Java world has on-the-fly compilation of JSPs and some can even do .java – but the fact remains there’s a an intermediate compilation step, and that not every Java developer has the environment or toolset to do that on-the-fly compilation (or probably more likely, most don’t).

Patrick went on to assume all sorts of bad practices were common amongst rails programmers, but we’ll just be nice and say that he was mislead by the quote and be done with the whole affair. (He also erroneously noted that there’s nothing like Ant for Ruby. First, Ant isn’t particularly language-specifc. Beyond that, Rake is an excellent tool for Ant-like tasks that uses Ruby code as declarations – not XML).

Rails deployment is probably remarkably similar to any other language. You work in development mode locally, test your changes, and eventually push the changes to the server. A good discussion of this is written up by Jamis Buck.

I’m looking forward to see the release of the “release manager.” It’s certain to make it easier to practice good deployment techniques with Rails.

Update: It appears that this has also been commented on by DHH, Dave Thomas, and the original Ant (and Tomcat) author himself, James Duncan Davidson (who also goes into details about how he and Mike Clark of Pragmatic Automation fame deploy their rails app.)