Recently, I decided to try out Ruby on Rails and see what all of the commotion around Rails is about. I’ve managed to get it setup on my OS X machine by following several conflicting and confusing instructions. Only after I went through the pain and suffering of manual setup did I discover Locomotive, a simple tool to develop Ruby on Rails apps. It’s everything you need all in one elegant package and you should check it out if you’re at all interested in RoR on OS X.
Following ONLamps’ excellent getting started article (and it’s followup), I have been able to make a simple demo app that retrieved content from a database using the generate scaffold command as a foundation, but for some reason when I try to edit, delete, or do anything else I get mysterious errors relating to ActiveRecord after trying to change a few things. I’ve familarized myself with Ruby by reading some of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (which I highly recommend reading), but I’m confused when it comes to the vast Rails API. I think I’ll be ordering Agile Web Development with Rails before going any further.
Nevertheless, I was impressed on how easy it was to create a custom template and how retrieving stuff from the database just worked in the template. I can only imagine what stuff you can do when you actually learn to use the framework properly. 😛