The Ruby Hit Squad Releases Capistrano Competitor “Vlad The Deployer”
The Ruby Hit Squad is a crack team of Ruby developers - formed of Ryan Davis, Eric Hodel, Wilson Bilkovich, and Shaners Becker - devoted to eliminating "needless complexity." Its first product, Vlad the Deployer, is a Capistrano competitor, designed to provide a fast, uncomplicated remote application deployment tool, but without the supposed complexity Capistrano offers. This is a top team of developers, and this is a big first splash, so check it out because it's bound to become popular in the Ruby world.
August 17, 2007 at 8:03 pm
That is awesome. So glad these guys are actively targeting Capistrano, it comes off as an arrogant prick. Yes, I realize the irony of that statement.
August 18, 2007 at 7:54 pm
I don't think it's MACHO enough yet; maybe they need even more GUNS and VIKINGS.
For fuck's sake.
August 21, 2007 at 12:06 am
Sad that they have to be so rude. Capistrano is an excellent tool which is free and has helped a lot of people. Why do these guys have to be such jerks about their replacement? I'd rather have the complexity than the negative attitudes any day.
August 21, 2007 at 7:22 pm
I love Capistrano and have been using it for as long as it has been publicly available. But I tried Vlad the other night and I really like the assumptions it makes about deployment.
If people don't improve on existing ideas, open source software dies. We need continuous improvement, refactoring, and simplification. These guys had ideas that couldn't be accomplished with mere patches to Capistrano, so they decided to start from scratch and write their own.
The same arguments mentioned in these comments could have been made about Capistrano itself. Capistrano did a fair amount of looting of the rake syntax, but no one complained. This project is an attempt to bring that all functionality back to rake, using the work already done by Jim Weirich to develop a great task-execution system for Ruby.
Vlad doesn't stop anyone from using Capistrano. It does provide another option that might work better for some people.
August 21, 2007 at 9:44 pm
The "rudeness" towards Capistrano surely isn't a great feature, but.. I think that if a healthy disdain for other projects and work is what leads to new ideas and even better work in the future, then so be it. Rails itself was fuelled by a lot of contempt towards PHP and Java solutions to the same problem set. Competition is what drives a lot of people, so if dissing Capistrano (as good as it is) leads to a better alternative, then bring on the dissing (as long as it stays somewhat friendly).
August 22, 2007 at 3:38 am
The rudeness is just a prison mentality... pick a fight with the biggest, baddest guy out in the yard and if you can hold your own you instantly elevate yourself above the lower level players.
Capistrano is without a doubt the de facto deployment tool. Attack it and you've just generated some nice controversy. Now, back to attention whoring 101.
August 22, 2007 at 10:32 am
Can't argue it worked for DHH though! :)