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Nov 24, 2005

My Ruby on Rails Experience, Part 1

This blog series will document my experience porting a non-trivial software application from PHP to Ruby on Rails.

The first thing I did was to visit the Ruby On Rails site. Then I clicked on the download menu and followed the instructions to get hold of Ruby Gems. This took me to RubyForge. After downloading and installing Ruby Gems, I figured out that I needed to download Ruby first. Duh. Shouldn't the Ruby on Rails site suggest this before downloading Ruby Gems?

Anyhow, I went to the main Ruby language site to download the latest version of the language. The download link there took me to the RubyForge page for the language. Then I downloaded the latest release and ran the installer. When the installer asked me for the directory, the "Install" button refused to highlight and let me continue. I got around this obvious bug by adding and then immediately removing a letter from the install path; at this point the installer let me continue.

After installation, I noticed that Ruby Gems was automatically installed by the language installer, therefore making my original install redundant. So I removed the initial installation of Ruby Gems and used the one that comes with the language instead. Finally, I used Ruby Gems to install Ruby on Rails and everything seemed to work.

When I created my first demo by typing "rails demo" and the ran it using "ruby script/server", the welcome page at "http://localhost:3000/" came up in my browser with the top heading truncated. I looked at the source of the page and it looks like the style sheet is a bit messed up.

Overall, my installation experience wasn't too bad, but could easily have been better. My recommendations to the Ruby crew are:

  • fix the installer bug
  • on the Ruby on Rails site, instruct people to download Ruby, not Ruby Gems
  • fix the style sheet on the demo program so the top heading is not truncated

My next step is to create a simple home page for my product that allows me to add, view, modify and delete a simple education artifact.

Part 2 of this series is here.

Slippers

Nov 24, 2005 at 12:53 AM |

Comments

Ganesh

Graham, I am going to follow your blogs and start my RoR 101. Nice blog

Posted by: Ganesh | Apr 12, 2007 at 05:15 PM

Ganesh

Good to read blog. I followed the instructions and got my rails up and running

Posted by: Ganesh | Apr 12, 2007 at 05:19 PM

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