I’ve been working with ruby on rails for the last few months and it’s been lots of ups and downs to me. It’s a learning curve and you just have to stand tall through the first frustrating weeks cursing the magic behind that you don’t understand. At least for a hard core java, spring, hibernate developer like myself, spoiled with great IDE support, which ruby lacks (It’s improving, with RubyMine, which I’m using, a “clone” of IntelliJ IDEA). But then it becomes better, a lot better!
Templates
Kind of what AppFuse was supposed to provide the java maven community (what’s happening with this? I like the initiative!), the template runner of rails (version 2.3+) is supposed to help you set up your project with useful libraries, as authentication, test frameworks etc. No need to talk to much about it, I’ve created one that you can see for yourself, http://github.com/oma/rails-templates !
It’s tailored to my own need, and I don’t even know what I want, so you’d probably want to clone or download it yourself, to customize. It has a list of gems, as Shoulda, Mocha, factory-girl, authentication, openid, mail and more. Play with it! Run
rails mynewapp -m http://github.com/oma/rails-templates/raw/master/oma_rails_template.rb
check that rake test works, then navigate to mynewapp and run script/server. in http://localhost:3000 you’ll see a nice welcome page with login and logout functionality.
Resources
God, I love this Ryan guy creating the screencasts at http://railscasts.com/. He targets the intermediate rails developer, but this is excellent stuff for noobs as well. He taught me rails template runner in episode #148
More templates at http://github.com/jeremymcanally/rails-templates
