I am new to Ruby and Rails. For my first application, I have built a
questionnaire engine. My development environment is ruby 1.8.4 and
Rails 1.1.6 on Mac OS X Server 10.4.8.
My development cycle is to use WEBrick for the web serving and Safari
for the browser. I know Safari has some major problems with
over-agressively caching things, so I suspect it for some of the problem
behavior.
Setup:
A questionnaire has multiple question groups, some of which
conditionally appear based on previous answers. Question groups display
specific questions.
Problem:
When using WEBrick and Safari, I will be going through a questionnaire,
and sometimes I get an error like:
“nil object where one was not expected. Attempt to call nil.inquiry.”
(paraphrased) However, reloading the page does not produce the same
error. Also, following the exact same path through the questionnaire
again does not usually trigger it.
At other times, it seems WEBrick does not complete sending the HTML…
only some of the questions render; looking at the SQL… all questions
were pulled from the DB.
In general… it feels like WEBrick is unpredictable.
When I go to production using LiteSpeed HTTPD 2.2.1, I do not see these
problems.
Request:
I have searched the logs, etc., looking for clues for this behavior, but
have none. I have searched various lists and forums looking for similar
reported problems, but have found none.
Please say there is someone who has some insight. Is this a problem
with my code or Rails or WEBrick? I’d hate to deploy and see this
happen “en mass” in production.
;¬)
Thanks,
Dirk Johnson