Previous to my new job it had been a long time since I did any programming in asp. That would have been around 2003 when working on the Augustana College marketing club webapp. I was soured on it then, convinced that PHP was the superior language. To be fair, asp.net is more of a set of tools for creating a webapp (since you can use any .net language you want), where as classic asp was really its own language.
Lots of things have changed since then and I’m finding myself enjoying building apps in asp.net as opposed to PHP or Java. I will still maintain that Java lends itself better to large, scalable webapps because of ejb and its built-in transaction handling. However, if your goal is to make a complex UI and make it quickly, I’d lean towards asp.net
My website has been down for the last 2+ days. The reason: Dreamhost upgraded to Rails 2.0 without any warning. Since some of my code was not 2.0 compliant – BAM! down goes my site.
In case I can help anyone else out of a bind, or avoid this horrible fate, here are the steps I had to take to get my website back up and running with Rails 2.0:
- Add a config.actioncontroller.session entry to my environments.rb file. I added it within the Rails::Initializer block. This was in response to the following error I found in my production.log file:
A secret is required to generate an integrity hash for cookie session data. Use config.action_controller.session = { :session_key => “_myapp_session”, :secret => “some secret phrase of at least 30 characters” } in config/environment.rb
Luckily the error tells you exactly what to do
- Next, I had to fix this error:
undefined method ‘paginate’
I fixed it by installing the plugin ‘classic_pagination’. To do this you simply have to run
“script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/classic_pagination” from your project root.
Apparently they took out built-in pagination support from Rails 2.0. This will_paginate plugin is supposed to be better, but I didn’t care to figure out how to work it right now.
- Finally, I had to fix all of my start_form_tag entries.
There was a good demo of how to do this in the what’s new in Rails2? slideshow