phipster

Hey, Dreamhost - when are we going to get mod_rails on our shared server accounts? Fellow Dreamhosters, if you’ve been waiting for an easier way to deploy and run small Rails apps, then vote for the mod_rails suggestion!

Overcame a minor irritation - I kept getting an HTTP 500 internal server error from Aptana’s built-in help documentation server after installing Aptana on my Windows Vista system. After some fiddling around with the Help Server’s host name and port, I found the sweet spot by setting the host name to “localhost” and leaving the port number field blank, allowing Aptana to pick its own value.

Partook of the all-day tutorial put on by Dave “that’s Roootes” Thomas and Mike “it’s Rowtes” Clark. It would have been a lot more enjoyable if I’d managed to sleep more than 2 hours last night, probably just keyed up from the 6.5 hour drive from Vancouver, 4 cups of coffee and jitters about how to keep my spand-branking new laptop from disappearing - it’s my first one, can you tell?

One key point Dave and Mike emphasized early on was that most of Rails is Ruby code, so the framework should really be called “Rails on Ruby”. In short - if you want to understand Rails, you’ve got to understand Ruby. This point was reiterated at the break by newly-met lunchmates as we ate the not-too-bad box lunch in the cavernous exhibit hall. They agreed that David A. Black’s book “Ruby for Rails”, while slightly outdated (Ruby 1.8.4, Rails 1.0), demystifies the “magic code” in Rails by explaining the key Ruby concepts and structures underlying Rails.

Some observations:

• Upon a show of hands, the audience was split about even between those who had written at least one Rails app, and those who were just getting their feet wet. I saw only one hand go up in response to the question as to how many participants were “super-comfortable” coding Ruby.

• After reading the lively discussion on Ruby and Women following Gregory Brown’s post, I was expecting a 90%+ male audience, however the gender split in the tutorial audience was more like 80/20, some improvement over the anecdotes in the discussion.

• Also well applauded was the news mid-afternoon that the tutorial attendees had raised over $12,000 for the charities nominated on Pragprog’s Justgive.org donation page.

• On a dimmer note, I was pretty chuffed that the organizers didn’t do more to provide AC power throughout the room. I managed to piggyback on the third or fourth power bar daisychained from one of the few wall outlets thanks to a generous neighbour.

The Mike ‘n Dave show was very well put presented, knitting together a few concepts that had been puzzling me, Nubie that I am, like “where does it all go?” and “how does the view get the data from the controller?”. Much of this is explained in Thomas’ book “Active Web Development with Rails”, but somehow hearing him explain it made it clearer. Somehow.

So what about the tutorial content? The first third of the day was a whirlwind introduction to and overview of Ruby, followed by a dissection of an example Rails app, with a potpourri of topics like migrations, REST and Capistrano rounding out the day.

jEdit + RubyPlugin is a great, simple Rails development tool, but I was getting annoyed today by the need to open two console windows (one to run Mongrel, another to do rails config or rake work), a Web browser and jEdit, then cd to the depot application folder and manually fire up the Mongrel server every time I wanted to do a little more work on the AWDWR depot tutorial.

I thought about writing up a Windows batch file to start up all this stuff for me, then I realized that I would be cobbling together more or less the environment RadRails provides out of the box.

Since I was well into the depot demo application I wanted to import it to RadRails. A quick Google search let me to Victor Kane’s AWebFactory - an amazing resource if you want to use RadRails while following along in AWDWR. Even more so, Victor illuminates many of the darker corners of MVC, OO and Rails that beginners might struggle with. Thanks for taking the time to write this invaluable guide, Victor!

Update (14 May 2007): Aptana has taken over development of Radrails, slowly integrating it into their Eclipse-based Web development IDE. The Aptana team and community are breathing new life into Radrails.

Wolfman has posted some great stuff at the intersection of jEdit, Rails and HAML, especially the set of Superabbrev shortcuts for Rails development!