21–30 of 46 posts
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.
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.
How is creating the local server environment on RoR or Python/Django easier than PHP/anything? I've been developing locally for years and while I can't mimic the exact hardware of the live server, I wouldn't be able to do that regardless of stack I chose.
Developing against a VM is not something I did before working at Rackspace, and I find the practice so useful that I will do what I can to continue doing it no matter where I work in the future.
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How is creating the local server environment on RoR or Python/Django easier than PHP/anything? I've been developing locally for years and while I can't mimic the exact hardware of the live server, I wouldn't be able to do that regardless of stack I chose.
For the Python world, virtualenvs and pip requirement files make deploying a local copy of a project take about 30 seconds, and it's completely independent of your overall system and all other projects you happen to be working on.
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.
How is creating the local server environment on RoR or Python/Django easier than PHP/anything? I've been developing locally for years and while I can't mimic the exact hardware of the live server, I wouldn't be able to do that regardless of stack I chose.
We used to develop historious like this, until we switched to redis/celery. Then it became too much hassle to install these in every machine, plus we wanted to test on the db we used (postgres) rather than sqlite, so we made a VM and now everything's dandy.
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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.
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-forw…
Local development doesn't scale.
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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.
* Install your different Firefox versions in different locations (so one doesn't overwrite the other)
* Use "firefox -ProfileManager" to create at least one different 'profile', which is Firefox's user data set
* Use "firefox -P -no-remote" to launch Firefox. -no-remote allows multiple Firefox instances to run on the same machine. -P profilename is necessary because you need a separate profile for each running instance.
More info at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments