WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 5116601

Is Tokaido (rails.app) Dead?

95 points| remear | 13 years ago |kickstarter.com | reply

40 comments

order
[+] wycats|13 years ago|reply
Tokaido is not dead. It's taken longer than I expected, but I've been wrapping up the requirements for the MVP over the past few weeks [1][2][3] and hope to integrate the code I've been writing into the UI in the next few days.

I initially anticipated that I'd be able to spend a number of full-time months on the work. I ended up being able to allocate time on a less consistent basis, largely because starting a company (tilde.io) ended up offering fewer opportunities for dedicated, isolated work than I expected. Thankfully, Patrick Gibson (of Tilde) and Austin Bales (of Do.com) ended up doing some of the iOS and design work, respectively, and I've focused my energies on the Ruby parts of the architecture.

My talk at RubyConf[4] goes into some detail about the architecture, and we're very close to shipping an early beta.

During the (long) time it's taken me to get this out the door, I've worked closely with Michal Papis (of rvm) to make the static binary build viable on both OSX and other Nix environments. Michal briefly shipped the binary Tokaido build as the primary build for `rvm install 1.9.3`, but difficulties in reliably building more recent patch levels have pushed that back some. We expect to be able to use the Tokaido build process to permanently ship binary rubies with rvm (and other ruby managers that are interested) once the build process for the current patch levels stabilizes again.

My plan for the MVP release of Tokaido is:

* Shipping the binary with a .app that can be dragged into /Applications

* The ability to add and remove applications via an application UI. You can then open a terminal window for these applications with a rock-solid Ruby environment that uses the binary build and makes sure that the ENV is set up correctly.

* The ability to start and stop any of these applications (via the web section of a Procfile) and browse them via `appname.tokaido` in the browser. This involves installing and executing a pure-Ruby proxy that supports the `app.tokaido` domain (see my RubyConf for more details on the nature of this beast; SMJobSubmit ftw!).

All of the above is largely complete (see the `tokaido` organization on GitHub and the links above for more). We have worked out how to use `SMJobSubmit` to enable the parts of `appname.tokaido` that require superuser access on first boot of the application bundle, and Patrick is just waiting for me to give him a fully self-contained zip of `tokaido-bootstrap` to execute from within the application. Of course, error handling is crucial for this, especially for low-level things like DNS servers and HTTP proxies.

Post-MVP, we hope to work on some of the more ambitious logging aspects of Austin Bales' original design.

[1] https://github.com/tokaido/tokaido-bootstrap

[2] https://github.com/tokaido/tokaido-dns

[3] https://github.com/tokaido/muxr

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iv3Gk95-v0

[+] biot|13 years ago|reply
Based on the comments, it looks like people are still waiting on handwritten thank-you notes and stickers which the Kickstarter project says were to be delivered in June/July 2012.

  > I ended up being able to allocate time on a less consistent
  > basis, largely because starting a company (tilde.io) ended up
  > offering fewer opportunities for dedicated, isolated work than
  > I expected.
The stated goal for raising $25K (and any excess) was to take time off of work to dedicate 100% to this, at least until Rails.app shipped. What happened?
[+] chaostheory|13 years ago|reply
I don't really care when tokaido ships. I've been very grateful to being able to piggyback on your work for years now. A few bucks to back whatever you want is the least I can do.
[+] Happymrdave|13 years ago|reply
Awesome and glad to hear that. Please post this (or just a link to this?) over on Kickstarter though, I'm guessing most of them don't read HN daily.
[+] remear|13 years ago|reply
Thank you for the update. I'm glad the project is still progressing. Also, thanks for mentioning Michal Papis. I know he's been working hard on binary builds of Ruby for both RVM and Tokaido.
[+] vudu|13 years ago|reply
I'm using my first post to thank you for what you already have done and look forward to this when it is ready. In my experience, biting off more than it turns out you can chew is a trait common to prodigious coders such as yourself. There is no better evidence than the (audacious!) projects you have tackled and completed in the past - leaving me confidant you will deliver Tokaido and it will be awesome. (but curious about all the hand-wringing by those surely not aware of your accomplishments) Code you have released freely in the past helps puts food on the table of lesser developers such as myself and I just wanted you to know you are appreciated.
[+] techpeace|13 years ago|reply
This will make future Rails Girls events a breeze. :) Thanks for all your hard work on this and everything else.
[+] akonan|13 years ago|reply
Thank you for doing this! Can't wait :)
[+] pretoriusB|13 years ago|reply
>I initially anticipated that I'd be able to spend a number of full-time months on the work. I ended up being able to allocate time on a less consistent basis

So you pocketed money from Kickstarter contributors to do something, and then you put the project in the back burner and gave priority to something else.

And not for serious health or personal reasons (which would be totally understandable). Just to start another business.

Nice.

Will keep it in mind the next time somebody asks me to fund a Kickstarter project.

[+] nachteilig|13 years ago|reply
While I'm interested in this (on a similar note, heroku's postgres app has been great for me), it seems like having to install and manage Rails is an important thing for new people to learn.

This is especially true if one wishes to push code to production and so on--even with when using Heroku, one still needs to understand the command line side of all of this.

It's also pretty easy to do these days.

[+] eggbrain|13 years ago|reply
It seems like having to install multiple different versions of Ruby/Rails is an important thing for a new person to learn, but we have RVM.

It seems like getting a rails app deployed on a server is an important thing for a new person to learn, yet we have Heroku which takes little effort.

We can say this about many of the things ruby/rails and the community has abstracted away for us, but that doesn't mean these tools aren't important in moving forward as a community.

I'm no slouch as a developer. Yet when I've installed RVM on 5+ systems, something _always_ goes wrong, and never in the same way. When it works it works great, but when it doesn't you spend your day bashing your head into a wall.

How will we encourage new programmers to join Rails and the Ruby community when they fail to even get it running?

[+] danso|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Rails, on a relatively clean system, is so easy to install through the command line that if you can't do that work...then you may not be the kind of person who can easily debug a basic Rails app in the first place...Not trying to be elitist here, as I'm the kind of person who runs homebrew scripts without reading the actual scripts. Just saying that if you can't even do that, then all the post-installation work of Rails is going to be a painful slog.