I haven’t had much chance recently to get much further with Ruby on Rails, despite buy/downloading the beta version of the new Rails textbook (Agile Web Development with Rails). Just too little time after redecorating a room and trying to keep up with my OU web server course…
Anyway, I have at least found a list of web hosting companies that support Ruby on Rails: Ruby on Rails Web Hosting – Your Guide To Finding Ruby Hosting For your Rails Applications
So, when I do get expert enough in RoR to actually try building a site…

I discovered one interesting feature from the little I’ve read of “Agile Development”: the ability to manage databases using Ruby, including keeping a record of changes made, and rolling back to earlier versions of a database. This certainly takes out one of the worst headaches in standard web development – keeping track of all those database changes you made weeks back using the command-line…

I think generally the hardest thing about RoR (the only hard thing) is getting used to and developing your own day-to-day model of how to get things done. At the moment my main hurdle is things like “ok so now I want to update my database structure so I have to… erm… oh right… type ‘ruby script/generate product_add’… or was that?…”. I guess once I’m past this stage, it’ll all fit into place and will seem a lot more natural.

Or maybe what’s needed is some kind of GUI that does all this without any command-line entries. My feeling is that must be the future for RoR if it’s really going to take off in a big way.

Incidentally, I have also tried out Radrails – a good if slightly quirky IDE which almost lets you import and build rails applications solely from the IDE.

I found this excellent tutorial on learning Ruby: Learn to Program, by Chris Pine. It makes Ruby look relatively easy to learn, although I’m beginning to wonder in what ways it’s easier than, say, Python. And since there’s the massive ‘pickaxe’ book I’m guessing there’s an awful lot more to Ruby, never mind Ruby on Rails.
There are also some weird quirks – well they seem like weird quirks from the point of view of other languages. For example @foobar means foobar is an instance variable. I suppose this is like saying this.foobar. But confusingly Ruby also has a ‘self’ keyword which acts like ‘this’ (and @). Hmmmm well maybe I need to check out the pickaxe after all…

So I was thinking of buying book on Ruby. The famous “pickaxe” seemed like a good place to start, although it looks like there’s an online version here: Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Anyway I just haven’t had the time to look at Ruby (on Rails) that I’d hoped to. What with one thing and another, and this OU server course…

speaking of which, we’re now into week 7 of that course. It’s been a useful and at times interesting course. However, I don’t know that it’s the kind of thing that’s really grabbed my enthusiasm. It’s hard to get thrilled by virtual hosts, apache log files, and stress-testing software. Oh well, it’s all useful stuff and it does impact on my job to a large extent.

I think I’d better start using some software to do load/stress testing of our system at work. This has never been undertaken before now, and to be honest it’s never really been an issue. I think I’ll take a look at JMeter and OpenSTA first, and see what they might have to offer.

Even better… InstantRailsWiki: Instant Rails