MonoRail is an attempt to provide a port of the Ruby on Rails Action Pack class. The open-source project is currently in Beta 4, can run on IIS or Apache, and has a great resource/tutorial/documentation site. If you’re stuck in a “Microsoft house”, you might want to check this one out.
I just thought I would share these comments from a person who recently tried my Installing Ruby on Rails with Lighttpd and MySQL on Fedora Core 4 tutorial…
Hello Mr. Rutherford,
I just wanted to thank you for your excellent article ‘Installing Ruby on Rails with Lighttpd and MySql on Fedora Core 4’. I am a complete Linux, MySql and Lighttpd newbie as my job involves Microsoft products. However, your article made the installation enjoyable – significantly less painful than getting Apache, RoR and FastCGI working on Windows 2000.
Thanks again
O’Reilly Network has a great interview with Ruby on Rails creator – David Heinemeier Hansson. The Q and A has some excellent responses like:
Q: What’s your favourite Rails feature?
A: In general, all the things it doesn’t do.
You’ve gotta like that kind of response from the lead developer of any software project!
Sascha Ebach has written a great tutoial ho how to use Gettext to localize your Rails web applications.
A Firefox sidebar for Ruby on Rails documentation is now available that offers easy access to the Rails documentation. There are two versions, one contains all the reference files that are installed locally for offline use, and another version that requires an active Internet connection.
Demetrius Nunes has created an offline version of the Rails documention that is available via a Windows Help (CHM) File. This makes the docs completely searchable and available in an easy offline format. If you use a Mac, be sure to check out the free Unix based chm viewer.
37signals, the company who created Backpack and the Ruby on Rails framework, are about to release a new application named Writeboard that they are touting as The app-less web-app – Signal vs. Noise. The promo material for this new product indicates that:
What if a web-application looked more like a web-document? What if the whole “application�? was a single document, a single URL? What if the interface was one page? No account, no preferences, no settings, no “navigation�? in the traditional sense. What if you could email it around just as you do a photo or a file attachment?
Sounds very interesting and what is even more intriguing (at least to me) is what new goodies we’ll see introduced into the next version of Rails!
James Duncan Davidson has written a tutorial that discusses Rails and Databases and shows you how simple it is to use SQLite as an alternative database engine.
Last month, Michael Buffington blogged about his experience porting a Coldfusion web application to Ruby on Rails. This month Michael explains Why he chose Rails over Coldfusion. He even offers tips for other switchers!
One of the challenges working with Rails can be the fact that you simply don’t create pages using a single script. Rails uses multiple files that need to be in specific directories to generate pages. This can confuse many Rails newbies. Sam Ruby however, has created a nice step-by-step Rails Confidence Builder tutorial that will help you sort out the files and folders.
