I’ve been programming with Ruby on Rails for some years now; I find Ruby a remarkably satisfying language to programme, and Rails is a productive toolkit which I use primarily for developing internal web apps for various purposes at work.

Up until now I’ve stuck with Rails 2; I have a handful of project that have a fair amount of code, and there hasn’t been a requirement that has merited the work that would go into updating my code to work with Rails 3. But now I’ve started work on a new web app, and it is a decent opportunity to start afresh, take account of what I’ve learned from the previous versions of Rails, and being a project using Rails 3.2.

I spent some time today reading the latest edition of Agile Web Development with Rails; I originally learned Rails with a much earlier edition of this book, so I thought it would be a good starting point for seeing where the current best practices are.

Now, while Kate is downstairs watching Strictly Come Dancing, I’m configuring a server with Phusion Passenger, which appears to be a very straightforward experience. For my previous apps in Rails I’ve tended to use Apache as a load balancer in front of a bunch of Thin web server processes.

It’s rather fun working with a newer version of a development framework; the bulk of it is familiar, but lots of changes, most of which make sense.