Productivity in Java vs. Rails

I am far more productive when writing Rails code than when writing Java. I just realized that one of the reasons for my lower productivity in Java is the need to recompile every time a make a change to a page on the site. In the 15 seconds or so it takes to recompile and redeploy to Tomcat, I get bored and am apt to go check my new favorite news site, popurls, or my RSS feeds, or (less likely) post to my blog. Suddenly those 15 seconds have become 5 minutes. And this happens many times throughout the day.

With Rails, I make a change, refresh my browser, and there it is. On to the next step.

HTTP Authorization with Apache/FastCGI

It took me forever to figure this one out, but if you want HTTP Authentication to work with Apache 2 and mod_fastcgi, you need this in your apache conf file:

FastCgiConfig -pass-header Authorization

FastCGI doesn't pass the Authorization header by default for some reason.

Processes, Threads, and Ruby

While researching the best way to handle calling an external program from Ruby (and capturing stdout & stderr), I came across this post, which is a good review of how processes and threads work:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/65155#75363

I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to do this, but I'll post it here when I figure it out. Ruby has a few different ways of opening and communicating with processes, but all seem to be lacking in some way or another. IO.popen lets you write to the process' stdin, and read from its stdout, but you can't get stderr without jumping through serious hoops (like redirecting stderr to a file and then reading the file...ugh). Open3.popen3 (brilliant naming) gives you stdin, stdout, and stderr, but the subprocess runs as a grandchild, so there seems to be no way to wait for it to finish.