Ruby on Rails
Saturday Jan 19, 2008
There has been a lot of talk about Ruby on Rail recently. I decided it was about time to check it out and see what is all about. In my previous life in the .com days I was a web developer. I have developed A LOT of sites using all sorts of technologies, CGI, Cold Fusion, ASP, JSP, Java, PHP you name it. In my current position I actually don't do any web development but again wanted to see what all the noise was about.
A quick google search points me to the Ruby On Rails homepage. Knowing nothing about it I decided to watch the demo's. The first demo is Create a weblog in 15 minutes. Wow looks very powerful, but the guy is going through the demo so quick, and there is a lot files there. I am guessing there is more than meets the eye.
What better place than to start than to get the software. Great my choices are compile myself, windows installer, OSX 10.4 has a guide and OSX 10.5 included with developer tools no further information. Hmmm I guess I am just supposed to know how to use it because I am on a mac...
I have googled around. To be fair to the steps are there on the directions page, there is just no explanation about them. For starters the directions says: gem update rails. Umm Okay what does that do? After googling around, Ruby has an package management feature, like apt or yum. It is called RubyGems and by running the update you will get the latest version. You need to run it as root (I ran it as me and got errors about no write permissions) so the command really should be:
#sudo gem update rails
At this point we should have our environment ready to go. Really one line command thanks to apple included Ruby with the OS.
Next the directions say to make your application:
#rails path/to/your/new/application
#cd path/to/your/new/application
#ruby script/server
Next is says to connect to the rails server
http://localhost:3000
And bam I am running rails! Okay excitement over. Now what to do? Where is the cool interface the guy was running in the video? Aggh if you keep reading you will discover it is an external editor, Textmate, that sells for $69. They do have a 30 day trial so here goes. I have Texmate installed and created a new project and pointed it to my existing files. I can see the project, but now what?
Need some RTFM:
Ruby Language
The Learning Ruby (Pickaxe) Book
Overall Ruby looks pretty cool and I will definitely be trying to be a web application with it.
|
|
|
|
Posted by osx on January 20, 2008 at 03:51 AM PST #