I’ve been messing around with Ruby on Rails on my webhost (Dreamhost, which is sweet), and I have to say it is excellent.
It was like someone said to me “Hey, you know most of the stuff you really hate about coding, well, I’m going to just do all that for you and let you get to work on the actual application.” And it does that much less annoyingly than VBA does…I hate VBA. (VBA is like someone said “Hey, lets take a good idea, and obsuficate it with legacy crap, and undocumented API’s, but try to make up for it with a good editor / debugger.”
I’ve talked briefly with some people about RoR, and I wanted to point out some links to help people get up and started with it really quickly. (most of these links are for you Seth)
Rad Rails is a text editor / framework manager that provides you with quick access to your database, controller files, and templates. This lets you run your webserver on your machine, and see the output right in the program.
Instant Rails is a quick pre-packaged setup to provide you with a very quick ruby on rails enviornment on your local pc to mess with. Nothing fancy, just pre-configured stuff, no installer, just unzip to a directory and run things out of there. It probably would work wonderfully with Rad Rails, but I haven’t explored the possiblities.
Here are some quick-reference cards on this site, the latest of which is for RoR. A great reference for CSS, Javascript, and all kinds of stuff, not just rails info.
Finally, there is a pretty good tutorial for some basic stuff on ONLamp which walks through setting things up on windows and creating a simple application. It also has some follow-up articles to get you using ajax really fast.
So, for now, I’m working on a few projects on a subdomain of my site, and they move pretty quickly. Maybe this weekend I’ll pick up a book to help me move into more advanced topics. Feel free to check out what I’m working on by adding /schedule or /helpers to to link above. (don’t want my projects referenced by search engines just yet….gotta install passworded logins first)