Really Getting Started in Rails

It’s true—I’m a little impatient, too. So in the interest of science, I’m running a little experiment, seeing if I can pick up Ruby on Rails without completely learning regular ol’ un-frameworked Ruby first. I’m learning as I go, and seeing how that works out.

If you’ve ever read the ONLamp “Rolling with Ruby on Rails” tutorial and wondered “Wait, what just happened?” (like me) then this may help explain things a little more clearly.

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE

RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal of this project is to enhance the rails development experience. RadRails seeks to make life simpler by providing rails developers with a single point to manage multiple projects, take advantage of source control and deploy their applications.

Want to be a cool kid and try out that newfangled Rails stuff?

Can’t be bothered to find web hosting that will support it that you’ll have to actually pay for?

Well TADA! RailsPlayground.com is offering FREE (as in beer) Rails (as in Ruby) hosting.

What do I get?

• 20 MB Disk Space
• 500 MB/Month Bandwidth
• 1 MySQL Database, 1 PostgreSQL Database
• FastCGI Ruby On Rails Support
• PHP 4.4.0, PERL 5.8.7
• FREE Setup, No Monthly Fee, No Ads on your site.

Rails! The magical webdev setup!
Rails! The Podcast!
Rails! The Breakfast Cereal!

Update (October 10, 2005): looks like they’ve stopped offering their free accounts and are now going with a $12/year pricing plan.

Web Development Trends for 2006 from Anil Dash has some interesting little bits for everyone to mull over when thinking about the coming year.

Curious about what technologies and techniques are going to be popular in the coming months and into the next year? Well, our crack team of editors here at dashes.com (that is to say, me) have assembled a list of up-and-coming trends that you should keep an eye on. Call it vocational education for people building Web 2.0.

I know everyone and their grandma has probably read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by now, but I love Sealab 2021, so I had to link to it too.

Strings are any sort of characters (letters, digits, punctuation) surrounded by quotes. Both single and double quotes are used to create strings.

“sealab”, ‘2021′, or “These cartoons are hilarious!” are examples.

So, I installed ruby and rails and all that good stuff again. I have to see if i can figure this stuff out, it’s starting to seem way too good to be missing out on.

Came up with a simple test app that I’d like to build, maybe I’ll even be able to get it to work. It’s not that I don’t like rails or that I’m too stupid to figure it out (okay, actually that part may be true), but it just strikes me as being so totally different than what I’m used to (PHP, JS, AS, etc.) from a structural standpoint that I tend to look at it and feel my eyes glaze over.

Another nice little tool from the folks over at TextDrive.

StrongSpace.com

Strongspace is a secure place to gather, store, back-up and share any type of file with your co-workers, friends and family. You can upload, download and manage your files over SFTP or with any modern web browser.