Ruby & Rails using Passenger
I have been toying with a MySQL server at work for loading data from a legacy database and creating user accounts in Microsoft’s Active Directory. I am using linux along with MySQL, Ruby and the Rails framework. While I am certainly no über-expert at this, I am finding the task not only manageable, but altogether pleasant. My current workflow looks like this:
- Mount Windows share using Samba
- Load data into MySQL and perform a bunch of transformations on it
- TODO: script creation of Active Directory accounts from MySQL Database (Python??)
I found that I needed to view the data as I was testing the MySQL transformations, so I turned to Ruby and Rails. I have not had a great deal of luck in the past with configuring Apache to serve up dynamic content via Mongrel or lighty, so I decided to give Passenger a go. For those of you that are unaware, Passenger works directly with Apache and requires almost no configuration. It is dead simple to use. So, within a matter of minutes (minus the time to tweak my database to conform to the Rails conventions) I had a web site up and running to display my data as I was testing it!
Open Source Software is becoming (for me at least) a more viable solution to the problems I face than the proprietary alternatives. The wealth of information available and the relative ease with which a great deal of work can be done is amazing.
