Ruby On Rails

I discovered a new version of the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plugin for Eclipse yesterday. I hadn't used it in quite awhile, so I downloaded this new version, installed it and was quite pleasantly surprised. I opened an old project I had laying around and rediscovered the simplicity of Ruby. I wrote a Test::Unit subclass and ran it in the RDT test runner. Very nice. Just like running JUnit tests in Eclipse.

So I decided this is cool, lets try this Ruby on Rails thing that I keep reading about. Mac OS X Tiger comes installed with Ruby 1.8.2, the Apache web server and SQLite, so I was more than half way there to getting setup. I followed this little tutorial to install RubyGems, a packaging system for Ruby libraries and tools. After that, installing rails (i.e., "sudo gem install rails") and creating a little sample application was a breeze. My only hiccup was fixing a permissions problem with my sample app (i.e., the public, db, and logs files needed to be readable and writable by apache).

Setting up a rails app involves generating a bunch of files so I can't claim to know what's really going on under the covers, but it's a very cool thing to be able to edit data through a web UI so quickly. Rails has impressed me so far. Now I just need to build something of my own and decide for myself if all these Ruby/Rails productivity claims hold water.