Aug 14, 2007

The Seattle Rb Guys Did It Again

After releasing the excellent Zentest suite, imageScience, Heckle and much more, Ryan Davis and his crew came back with great news.

From Saturday, August 4th to Tuesday, August 7th, the Ruby Hit Squad was in full effect. After almost 4 days working almost none stop, they released Vlad the Deployer

What’s Vlad?

Some sort of simple and efficient version of Capistrano with simple goals:

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Nothing to 1.0 in four(ish) days.
Targets the 80% use case.
Uses Rake, as god intended.
Use the right tool for the job (ssh, rsync, etc).
Fold in the Rails Machine recipes.
Clever is bad. Period.

If you are like me, you love Capistrano and couldn’t imagine working without it, but you also wonder Jamis decided not to extend Rake instead of creating something similar but not really. You would also really appreciate the last objective:

Clever is bad. Period.

I didn’t have the opportunity to test it yet, but I have to say that I’m excited to see alternative solutions in the Rails world. I like conventions, but I like having the choice of which conventions I want to follow ;)