Playing with Ruby on Rails
After reading about it a lot, I finally got round to installing Ruby on Rails onto my Powerbook. Oh and for those scratching their heads, Ruby on Rails is a framework for building web applications fast and was used to create sites like Odeo and Backpack.
It was actually a fairly simple process, just a matter of going through the help docs. One thing I will pass on though. Once I had it installed and started and had the built in WEBrick server running. I would go to the URL of my app and it wouldn’t work. Anyway to cut a long story short instead of using http://localhost/myApp, if I used http://127.0.0.1/myApp everything worked. This only took me about 8 hours to work out 
I also downloaded the new book ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’. It should be available in print by the end of the month but as I was going on holiday I thought it might be nice to gen up while I was away.
Well, it is indeed a fast way to develop. I had a working app that could easily read write and edit to a database in about 10mins. I am still learning but I am really getting on at speed. Once you’ve got your head around how the framework operates complex tasks are generally do-able in a couple of lines or code. To finish, here’s a great link to a movie that explains how you can build a blog engine in 15mins with Ruby on Rails
