rundeks

Long time no post. Sorry all. Actually I have been busy working on several personal Rails projects. Now that I am actually using Rails I am truly impressed with it. I can't believe how wonderful it is to work with. I am going through a change like I did when I learned Object Oriented Programming. I've been looking for something like that for a long time. Currently one of the projects I am working on is going to support tagging and versioning. Guess what? There are plugins for both of those features!!! Rails and the community rock. Currently I am trying to decide if I want to use the acts_as_taggable plugin or gem. The plugin is newer, but not as well documented. The gem has more documentation, but is older. Plus plugins just feel better than using gems for this sort of thing. So I think I will go with the plugin and if I hit issues I will try the gem.

-Gotta go I will try to write more later.

So this weekend was family time. I didn't get to do much with Rails.I did preorder a new book. ( http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails2/index.html ) This is the best Rails book / resource yet. I bought access to the PDF which is available in Beta right now. first it gives you a good intro tutorial. Second it then goes through Rails in detail. Third through all of this it also tells you whereto look in the official Rails docs for more details. for some reason the Rails docs just don't flow well for me, but thanks to this book I am starting to understand the layout. That helps a lot.

Today was the Madison Rails User Group (MadRails) meeting. It was very interesting. It was a presentation from John W Long about Radiant. Radiant is a CMS created in Rails and is what runs the main ruby website. It was more about Radiant then Rails or Ruby, but just seeing what else someone had done and the choices they made was very interesting. It was nice to see other people in the Madison area working on Rails. Unfortunately I won't be able to do much with Rails again until next weekend.

Well today I started my own app. I don't want to say too much about it yet. Like many sites it will have accounts with permissions for different parts of the site so I have started off working with that. It took me a bit longer than I was hoping, but not because of Rails or Ruby, but because of my inability to change my thinking. I see that there are some areas I need to learn more about. Like how stuff in rhtml files really work. That has been a bit frustrating. I love the scaffolding though. I used the code generator to create the scaffolding code for me and that helped a lot to setup pages to edit Users, Roles, and Rights. I am impressed so far. I think next weekend will be spent figuring out more the parts of the language that are still a mystery to me. Like rhtml. Once those are out of the way I think I can start on the next part of my own app. The map editor.

For any interested I got the base code for the User, Roles, and Rights from Rails Recipes from the Pragmatic Programmers ( http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/index.html ). Specifically I used recipes #31 and #32. I found it very easy to modify their basic concept of Rights so a right can be associated with any Action in a Controller and create a single super right that gives access to every Controller and Action.

SO this weekend I finished my first tutorial app. I found several mistakes in the book (Ruby on Rails: Up and Running) I was using though. Namely in section 5.7 They messed up some of the CSS names. I submitted it as an errata. Also their downloaded zip files had a few mix ups. The zip for Chapter 6 it's directory in the zip is labeled start-chapter-7-zip. They same sort of thing happens with the zip for Chapter 8. Around the same time as I found those typos I ran into another problem so I thought oh great another typo. So I went online to find a solution to that typo since it was with a ruby part. While searching online I found out someone has listed the full contents of the book I was reading online for free!!! Good thing I got access to that book through Safari and didn't buy it. I'd have been pissed if I payed money for something that is already online for free.

Well I am really starting to like ruby on rails. I have a good understanding of the language now and I want to try to build a real web app I come up with on my own. So my current plan of attack is:

1) Find a good reference to ruby. I have found some for rails. This so when I don't understand the language I can figure it out.

2) Come up with a good sample app. I have a few ideas.

3) Create it and see how fast it really it is. :-)

Again I probably will only be able to work on this over weekend, but I'll be sure to update this blog and let everyone know how it is going on.

Today I read the first chapter of "Ruby on Rails: Up and Running" by O'Reilly (http://safari.oreilly.com/0596101325). I installed instant Rails and did the security patch/upgrade. Things went really well. I kept waiting for something to break and things just worked. I did the first chapter, "Zero to Sixty: Introducing Rails". It went well. I just used Wordpad for my editing. I see there is an Eclipse plug in, but before I want to use it I want to make sure I understand what is going on. There is a lot or code generation happening so far. It's scary a bit, but works. I probably won't be able to get to chapter two until next weekend. So probably no new posts until then. Also a coworker pointed out this site as a good starting point, http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html?page=1. I skipped the article and looks good. If I get stuck in my book I will go look at that. Otherwise I want to finish the book first. I have to admit, things just worked and worked well. I kinda like this. I still want to see how it will perform on a real application though. Something thing with some meat behind it, but alas you must learn to crawl before you run.

-rundeks

So my friends tell me I need to post. SO here I am wonder what they heck I have to talk about. At the same time other stuff is going on in my life (don't want to get into it now) and this Ruby on Rails thing keeps being brought up over and over. To be honest I know of ruby before rails. I liked ruby, but always thought of it more like scheme or lisp. A fun language, but not for anything real. I guess that has always made me not believe this whole rails thing. So now we are here. I need something to write about. I keep hearing about how wonderful rails is, but don't believe people. Well I foolishly though HTML was a fad so maybe I am wrong again. ;-)

SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN ALREADY?
It means I went onto Safari (http://safari.oreilly.com) and found my self a book on Rails. I am reading through it and will give rails a real chance. AND .... Foolishly I will write it all down so that some day I can look back and laugh at my self. :-)

-rundeks