Briefly Exploring Ruby

Today, the most illus­tri­ous of all days, UW-IT staff explored new tech­nolo­gies, con­cepts, and ideas that they’ve been mean­ing to do but were always delayed due to more press­ing mat­ters, oper­a­tional con­cerns, or priorities.

I decided to explore Ruby and how it inter­acted with our Uni­form Access sys­tems. Com­ing from a Perl and PHP back­ground, I’ve been slowly pok­ing away at Ruby for a cou­ple of years now, but never have really found the time to use it in much depth on the sys­tems that I support.

Since we’re plan­ning a server refresh and are greatly improv­ing soft­ware ver­sions installed on the web pub­lish­ing clus­ters, I took the oppor­tu­nity and tested out Octo­press, RVM, and other sim­i­lar tools on one of the new Ovids we’re test­ing inter­nally. Every­thing went rel­a­tively smoothly, and I’d con­sider the day a success.