Inacom Tech Blog

Recently Inacom had the privelage of hosting the Madison Web Design & Development Meetup. The topic for this meeting was Advanced CSS. I put together a slideshow to try to keep the presentaiton more guided, but because of the depth of the topic we wound up going quite a bit over our loose 1 hour timeslot. I just wanted to thank everyone for sticking around and seeming quite interested! I had a great time presenting and I hope that you all enjoyed our discussions. If you're looking for the demo files and the presentation check them out in the full article.

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Some very shocking and awesome news has recently hit the ruby community. Merb is being merged into Rails and will culminate with a release of rails sometime around February next year. Sporting the name Rails3, this marks only the 2nd time any 2 major web frameworks have put down the gloves and hugged it out. I'm excited to get some of the performance optimizations promised by the merb core, and am looking forward to a unified community. This merge should push rails even closer to being the de-facto standard for building a web application. See posts at http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/ and http://rubyonrails.org/merb, and http://loudthinking.com/posts/36-work-on-what-you-use-and-share-the-rest for more details.

The first website that I built for Inacom using ruby on rails was deployed to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server and I hand rolled my own install for everything (it was painful). We had MySQL on the same 256 MB VM as the rails code was running from, and we setup a proxy with Apache and Mongrel. Deploying from Capistrano 1.4 made things a bit easier once everything was setup, but the initial build was not an easy task. It was also my first time doing what some would consider fairly heavy Linux command line system administration, so that didn't speed up the process either.

Fast forward 2 years and now I'm deploying servers in a mater of minutes, not days thanks to the deprec gem (using mongrel and nginx) and VMWare Virtual Center which allows us to store templates of our production rails servers. But VMWare VC isn't the only Enterprise product that we've integrated with our rails development, we can deploy to Windows with IIS (though it still isn't highly recommended because of performance concerns), OS X Server, and our de-facto favorite Linux Ubuntu.

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Welcome to the Inacom development blog. We hope that our writings will help the community as a whole and also provide a place for our developers to branch out into technical writing and training. Look for more blogs from other departments in the near future as Inacom continues to expand it's visibility in today's digital content market.

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