From: Mark  Watson <mark.watson@...>
Date: 2005-11-21T08:17:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Help requested: new book

Hello James,

Good ideas, thanks. Even for legacy databases not using the RoR
database naming conventions can be wrapped with ActiveRecord with a
littl extra work. The name 'Enterprise Ruby' was chosen because it did
not have 'Ruby on Rails' in it. For all but very high volume web
services, WEBrick is great. I am very much into REST so expect a lot of
material concerning light weight web services.

I am fairly much of a J2EE guru, but I find myself not using much of
J2EE for most Java server side software jobs. I think of RoR in the
same way: sometimes the whole stack is  not required. Again, I really
like WEBrick, in the way I like CheryPy (except I have just about
stopped using Python).

One thing that I am still mulling over: personally I now only deploy to
Linux servers (although I was running KnowledgeBooks.com from an OS X
server for a few years) and I am considering only covering Linux for
any depoyment issues. Largely, except for some external tools,
developing on Windows or OS X makes no real difference, but I only want
to get into gritty deployment strategiesfor Linux.

Anyway, I love to write and I anticipate lots of fun writing this book.

re: Arizona: yes, after livng in California most of my life, livin in
the mountains of North/Central Arizona is a great change. I organize my
work schedule to have some time during the day for hiking and fishing
time :-)

-Mark