Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#1

Post by kemayo » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 9:34 PM UTC

Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART
dt.deviantart.com

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#2

Post by sammcd » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 9:40 PM UTC

After talking with a few small PHP teams this seems like the logical conclusion whenever growing a team of PHP developers. Its just very hard to perfectly recreate your server environment locally on multiple OS's.

Its a great solution, but I much prefer working with RoR or Python/Django where recreating the server environment locally is much easier.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#3

Post by kemayo » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 9:44 PM UTC

I do acknowledge that this is something that looks very "oh, how obvious!" to the modern crowd, but deviantART is a 10 year old PHP app...

Of course, even if you're running a modern web framework in Ruby/Python/somethingtrendy, a VM makes a lot of sense. It lets you run the exact versions of everything that your production environment is, without having to worry about it.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#4

Post by drwxrwxrwt » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 9:49 PM UTC

sammcd wrote: post #2

After talking with a few small PHP teams this seems like the logical conclusion whenever growing a team of PHP developers. Its just very hard to perfectly recreate your server environment locally on multiple OS's. Its a great solution, but I much prefer working with RoR or Python/Django where recreating the server environment locally is much easier.

even for RoR or python - might make sense for those working on multiple projects simultaneously, using different generations of frameworks

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#5

Post by tsmith » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:00 PM UTC

I wonder how long this took to set up? And why they don't run their production servers as VMs as well?

Edit: I think it's an awesome idea, btw, and something we try to push to web service shops at GridCentric.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#6

Post by Groxx » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:02 PM UTC

drwxrwxrwt wrote: post #4

sammcd wrote: post #2

After talking with a few small PHP teams this seems like the logical conclusion whenever growing a team of PHP developers. Its just very hard to perfectly recreate your server environment locally on multiple OS's. Its a great solution, but I much prefer working with RoR or Python/Django where recreating the server environment locally is much easier.

even for RoR or python - might make sense for those working on multiple projects simultaneously, using different generations of frameworks

There's RVM in the Ruby world. Anything similar for Python?

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#7

Post by kristianp » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:10 PM UTC

It's not clear to me why they don't just run development on their local machines. I'm not familiar with PHP, though. I'm all for having a build/test vm, though.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#8

Post by marte » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:12 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #6

drwxrwxrwt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even for RoR or python - might make sense for those working on multiple projects simultaneously, using different generations of frameworks

There's RVM in the Ruby world. Anything similar for Python?

virtualenv

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#9

Post by evilhackerdude » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:13 PM UTC

I only skimmed the article but I assume it’s about the benefits of running VMs to have solid dev environments with zero setup cost.

Let me ask another question: Will it become feasible to move code, tools and everything else into web services? Imagine you have your favorite editor (emacs, TM, vim) running in a browser window. Only that it’s live-updating like, e.g., Ethercodes or Wave. And you have very straight-forward access to SCM features like staging hunks of code. Also the code deploys straight to heroku or whatever. It could, of course, also go through closure or sproutcore in case of a fancy js client app.

Do you think it’ll all evaporate (I refuse to say cloud :) eventually?

The thing is I’m really going through a lot of pain setting up my system and other’s systems over and over again. Yes, there are ways to automate that but the effort is too high for most or we would all be doing it right now.

Re: Faster Web Development With Virtual Machines at deviantART

#10

Post by Groxx » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 10:17 PM UTC

marte wrote: post #8

Groxx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's RVM in the Ruby world. Anything similar for Python?

virtualenv

I'd say that seems to cover both bases for not needing a VM.

Every language should have something as simple as these. Heck, it should be part of the OS, IMO; why I can't (easily) run two different versions of Firefox with two different profiles at the same time is beyond comprehension.