Huh? What’s that incessant buzzing? Oh… it must be all the hype surrounding the new web app framework Ruby on Rails!
I have to admit, I wasn’t really all that interested in learning yet another programming language, but when I found out my webhost now supports Ruby On Rails, I really didn’t have an excuse not to look into it. After running through a tutorial, I decided I’d go ahead and install it locally to let myself tinker a bit more. As I’m sure you know, all Apple computers come with a built-in web server and tons of things like php, mysql, and, much to my surprise, ruby, so installation was fairly easy. But getting it to actually work, on the other hand was not.
Error after error, google search after google search, and I was pretty much near giving up hope. One page would say, oh, the ruby installation that comes with Tiger is flawed. Another would say oh, it’s fine but you need to upgrade your stock mysql. Yet another had a cryptic set of instruction on how to get it all to work, which in the end, shocker of shockers, did not work.
I was very close to Apple-Z’ing the whole thing when I came across Locomotive, and Ruby development application that works as a more or less stand alone development environment. Want to start on a new app? Click the little plus button at the bottom of the window, enter a name, and you’re good to go. Made some changes to essential code and need to restart the server? Click restart! It’s that easy.
Yes I know, it really way cool to be able to use the terminal to do everything from deleting a directory to ssh’ing to your networked fruit bowl to make sure you still have some bananas left before you walk into the kitchen, but for anyone looking to tinker with Ruby on an Apple machine, I highly recommend Locomotive as a tool to help get you going.
Learn more about Locomotive at SourceForge.
And, if you’re curious, more on Ruby on Rails at, that’s right, rubyonrails.org.
Post a Comment