Even as my spare time dwindles with the responsibilities of hosting the family Christmas celebrations at our house this year, I still try to find the time to continue my Ruby on Rails education. In 2005 I looked at a lot of technologies but RoR is one of the first to actually have me interested enough to do more than just read a book. Let me explain...
At work we have a foosball ladder which consists of a white board and a dry erase pen. While refreshingly low tech I thought "here's a problem just waiting to be automated with software!". Okay it doesn't really need software but it's a complex enough problem for me to get my feet wet with Rails. I unabashedly looked at the ladder options already on the web and (ahem) borrowed some of their ideas. I need to store information about players, teams, the ladders themselves, matches and the games in those matches and then I can go onto bells and whistles like enabling online challenge negotiations, the ability to mark a players status, and showing player/team stats.
So already I have several tables in a PostgreSQL database with a variety of relationships between them and I'm slowly figuring out what I can do with RoR's ORM tool ActiveRecord. So far I've been pretty happy with the support for optimistic locking, one-to-one (belongs_to & has_one), one-to-many (has_many), and many-to-many (has_and_belongs_to_many) relationships, dynamic finders, and transaction support.
I especially like being able to just play around in Ruby. I can mess with the tables, add and remove columns, change names, etc and then quickly see my changes take shape in my Ruby object model by running a simple Ruby script to create some objects and save them to the database. And no requirement to compile, or generate ORM XML mapping files has me feeling quite empowered.
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