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Ruby on Rails

Rower_CPU

Rower_CPU

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Oct 5, 2001
11,219
2
San Diego, CA
So, I've been hearing more and more about this technology, and I spent some time on the project website today to see what it's all about. I figure that if 37signals trusts it enough to use for developing their web apps there must be something to it.

Anyone out there have any experience with developing on Rails? Any pointers to good starting points for self-teaching?
 
Guess I'm the resident expert, then, until someone else steps forward to claim the title. ;)

For those of you with any PHP/MySQL development background take a look at this movie and tell me you're not impressed. It'll give you a better idea of what the technology is all about.

I hope someone else chimes in, but if not, feel free to ask me how I'm doing with learning it on my own. :)
 
I'm far from a developer but this looks really interesting to me, the recent buzz around Ruby has been pretty amazing. From what I hear, there were quite a few presentations on Ruby on Rails at WWDC.

I've been playing with AJAX a little on my site and I've been very impressed (with AJAX not the site ;) :p). The fact that RoR seems to have wonderful support for AJAX makes it even more intriguing for me. The combo of AJAX and RoR seems exciting and certainly has a lot of potential.
 
I hadn't heard of this before, but it looks pretty cool from the video. If you find any good resources I hope you do post them here, I'd like to take a look at them too.
 
Rower_CPU said:
Any pointers to good starting points for self-teaching?
Click to expand...
Curt Hibbs has written several good introductory articles on Rails for O'Reilly's ONLamp.com: see this one, the follow up, and a more recent article on the AJAX support in Rails. The Ruby and Rails communities (including me) are also anxiously awaiting the publication later this summer of Agile Web Development With Rails, by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson (the lead Rails developer).

Hope this helps.
 
munkle said:
I'm far from a developer but this looks really interesting to me, the recent buzz around Ruby has been pretty amazing. From what I hear, there were quite a few presentations on Ruby on Rails at WWDC.
Click to expand...
According to this article, two different Ruby-themed tutorials are among the top ten in terms of registration for the upcoming OSCON 2005.
 
Lyle said:
Curt Hibbs has written several good introductory articles on Rails for O'Reilly's ONLamp.com: see this one, the follow up, and a more recent article on the AJAX support in Rails. The Ruby and Rails communities (including me) are also anxiously awaiting the publication later this summer of Agile Web Development With Rails, by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson (the lead Rails developer).

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. :)

I had come across some of that on the RoR website, but it's easy to get sidetracked with all the content there.

Have you done an installation on OS X? I'm going to be diving in based on the directions for Tiger and would appreciate any pointers you might have.
 
Lyle said:
Curt Hibbs has written several good introductory articles on Rails for O'Reilly's ONLamp.com: see this one, the follow up, and a more recent article on the AJAX support in Rails. The Ruby and Rails communities (including me) are also anxiously awaiting the publication later this summer of Agile Web Development With Rails, by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson (the lead Rails developer).

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

About done reading the first article. RoR seems like a great tool! :eek: :cool: :cool:
 
wow, i watched the video and it looks like a great technology.

i've heard rumblings about this for a while..but never looked into it..i guess now is the time to start, before its too late!
 
Rower_CPU said:
Have you done an installation on OS X? I'm going to be diving in based on the directions for Tiger and would appreciate any pointers you might have.
Click to expand...
I have (just for some local testing, no deployed web applications) but it's been awhile. I'd go with what's on the Wiki, and follow up with questions to the mailing list (or the IRC channel) if you run into any snags. I know that there are a lot of people running Rails on Mac OS X (including, for example, DHH, the lead developer) and so this shouldn't be an issue.
 
Man, I have all the resources ready for learning rails. It's just a shame that learning it is like #10 in my personal queue. I got way too much stuff on my hands. But it's great to see others on MacRumors start.
 
I've tried running a few simple forms on my computer and it seems great. I'm not use to the structure yet (I'm a PHP user) but I'm impressed . It definitely puts a whole new feel (at least for me) on database management. I don't know it well enough to whole-heartedly recommend it over PHP yet, but many do, so give it a try!
 
I like the getting started page.

"OSX You can use the installer or Darwin Ports. See Rails On OSX.
Windows Get the great one-click installer which you will have to double click afterwards…"

You obviously know how to develop applications but they tell windows users to double-click!!
 
I just started looking into recently as well. I installed the whole package this morning and ran into a couple problems, but I think everything is working for now. For some reason I have to source my .bash_login to get the correction version of ruby running each time, but after that it seems to work right.

I plan on tackling one of the tutorials mentioned above some time this week. All in all it looks like a very exciting web technology.
 
Completed the install

I completed my install on my system running Panther if anyone needs some help getting theres working, I can try and assist you. I used the guide here:
http://hivelogic.com/archives/2005/03/18/ruby_install/
I ran into some problems, specifically where to put the PATH info, but I finally got it all figured out today.

Let me know if anyone runs into some problems installing on Panther...
 
Ooh, now this does look ever so interesting. Hadn't heard of it before I read this post, but I just checked and it looks like Dreamhost has RoR installed for all accounts, so I've got no excuse (save lack of time) not to try it out.

Looks like fun, and might be just what the doctor ordered for putting together a simple web frontend to a database I'd been thinking about cobbling together.
 
Rower_CPU: Thanks for pushing me to this thread. I didn't see it.

Anyways, I have a few questions. I'm not a programmer, but I've dabbled with asp in the past and now with php. Rails looks very promising, but what about for simple tasks? Sometimes I just need very simple tasks done like the use of variables to track what page the user is currently on. Can Ruby code be embedded into html and used as basic server-side scripting?

Basically I want to be able to learn 1 language very well and Ruby code is so nice. Can ruby itself replace php?
 
radiantmark said:
Sometimes I just need very simple tasks done like the use of variables to track what page the user is currently on. Can Ruby code be embedded into html and used as basic server-side scripting?
Click to expand...
Yes, Ruby code can be embedded into HTML for basic server-side scripting stuff, and (as you surmised) Rails would be overkill for something like that. You just want to use eRuby (which I think stands for "embedded" Ruby), in conjunction with mod_ruby (assuming you're running an Apache web server).

radiantmark said:
Basically I want to be able to learn 1 language very well and Ruby code is so nice. Can ruby itself replace php?
Click to expand...
Oh, definitely. I don't know a lot about PHP but my impression is that its use is primarily for web applications (i.e. you don't see a lot of standalone applications written in PHP). In contrast, Ruby is a general purpose programming language that, among other things, happens to be useful for web applications programming, whether it's with Rails or some other framework. As you begin investigating Rails, I think you will find that we have a lot of "converts" from the PHP and Java camps.
 
jaseone said:
you want .RHTML files ;)
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Just as clarification (for radiantmark, not you, jaseone) RHTML is the standard file extension for eRuby files. That is to say, as part of its pipeline for rendering web pages, Rails uses eRuby to transform RHTML files (with embedded Ruby code) into HTML files.

P.S. And I second that nomination for Agile Web Development with Rails.
 
Lyle said:
Yes, Ruby code can be embedded into HTML for basic server-side scripting stuff, and (as you surmised) Rails would be overkill for something like that. You just want to use eRuby (which I think stands for "embedded" Ruby), in conjunction with mod_ruby (assuming you're running an Apache web server).

Oh, definitely. I don't know a lot about PHP but my impression is that its use is primarily for web applications (i.e. you don't see a lot of standalone applications written in PHP). In contrast, Ruby is a general purpose programming language that, among other things, happens to be useful for web applications programming, whether it's with Rails or some other framework. As you begin investigating Rails, I think you will find that we have a lot of "converts" from the PHP and Java camps.
Click to expand...

Thanks that helped a lot (as do the links you supplied, jaseone).
 
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