ThoughtHook

I just got through reading Martin Fowler’s excellent article on using the Rake build Language. It is a very easy to understand and fairly complete initiation into basic and intermediate build/automation techniques using Rake. It is old (Aug 10th 05) but, in my opinion, still quite relevant.

You can find the article here, and his main site (excellent!) is here: http://www.martinfowler.com

I stumbled across the article while exploring deployment/system administration options utilizing Ruby. Because I am using RAC for my database instances, I have multiple servers that I need to consistently update with scripts, configuration, data, etc. I have been looking into Capistrano for this task (even though it is an Oracle system) and it looks promising, if a bit kludgy to implement without SCM in place and accessible from the server.

Once I have the deployment solution figured out, I’ll write it up.