Locomotive is probably one of the easiest ways for Mac users to give Ruby on Rails a spin. The installer includes Ruby, Rails, FCGI support, Lighttpd webserver, SQLite and a great collection of Ruby Gems to extend the Rails framework. A short screencast will show you how to begin using Locomotive and RoR.
If you’re looking to build RIA’s using Ruby on Rails you should check out the OpenLaszlo gem that provides Rich Flash output for your Rails views. There is also a Rails plugin to hook it all up for easy generation of OpenLaszlo applets.
Are you unsure about using Ruby on Rails for your next web project? Here are some answers to the Questions Ruby on Rails skeptics ask.
If you’ve spent any time developing with Java and are interested in checking out this Ruby on Rails thing, Ruby off the Rails by IBM will help you transition from Java to Ruby. The focus is on learning Ruby as opposed to Rails, but if you want to do any serious Rails development, you’ll have to learn Ruby anyhow!
Dan Benjamin has posted a very complete tutorial on Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger. Recognizing this great tutorial, Newby on Rails did Dan one better, and turned his tutorial into a simple shell script that lets you intall the combination of Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL using a single command!
If you live on the west coast of Canada or the US and are interested in Ruby on Rails development you might be interested in the upcoming Canada on Rails conference. The dates are April 13th & 14th, 2006 and includes a kenote address by David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails). Registration is only $175CAD.
I just recieved an email from my hosting provider that indicated that a feature I had requested had just been implemented.
This is just a note to let you know that we’ve now completed the suggestion - “Install RubyGems” … We did it! RubyGems is installed on all shared hosting
servers along with a selection of gems.
Here is how it works, Dreamhost allows their members to make suggestions as to how they think Dreamhost can be improved. Member make suggestions like “Install MySQL 5.0″, “add module x to PHP”, etc. Other members can then vote on the suggestions, and those that recieve the most votes, get the highest level of consideration from the Dreamhost team. But to make the system even better, each member is given a limited number of votes, so you can/should only vote for the suggestions you feel most passionate about. If the suggestion you vote for is implemented, you get that vote back to support another suggestion.
If you’re in the market for a new webhost, you should check out Dreamhost and their excellent packages that include unlimited domains, unlimited mySQL databases, unlimited sub-domains, high bandwidth and storage quotas, and support of PHP4, PHP5 and Ruby on Rails! If you’re happy with what you see, signup and use the Promo Code dmm to recieve $60 off your first year’s hosting cost.
Instant Rails is a cool project that provides developers with a contained sandbox for working with Ruby on Rails. In fact, Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer is needed as you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it.
Erik Veenstra presents a very complete tutorial describing how to Distribute Rails Applications.
RadRails is an integrated development environment for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal of the 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. The IDE is cross platform supporting Windows, OSX and Linux.
