Going off the rails

Posted on July 17th, 2007 by Jeff

Everyone knows what Ruby On Rails is, right? Well, it’s a pretty impressive framework for building web applications. It comes from those aesthetically pleasing guys who brought you Basecamp and Backpack.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Agile Web Development With Rails and the things that you can do in Rails with just a few lines of code is just downright amazing. You need to generate xml from your data model — no problem, just add one (one!) line of code to your application and it’s done. It doesn’t get any easier, folks.

I have a vertical web application in the works that’s targeted at both small businesses and everyday users. There’ll be more detail coming soon and my plan is to write about my experiences with Rails here. I hope you’ll enjoy reading along.

Getting your machine set up for Rails development is pretty easy and there are many guides online. I was able to get my XP desktop configured with no problems using the normal ruby and rails installation instructions. I tossed Instant Rails on my laptop too.

What is painful, at least right now, is getting a current version of Rails on my Fedora Core 2 server down in the basement. This box serves as my personal web server, NAT/Firewall, database server, among other things so I’m loathe to tear it down and install a newer OS though I know I need to. As it stands, I have Ruby 1.8.4, RubyGems 0.8.11 but Rails 1.23 as that’s what gem installed. The problem is that rake is complaining about Object:Gem and some quick googling tells me that it’s because Rails needs a newer version of RubyGems than I was able to install. FC2 can’t do the latest Ruby (unless I build it from source, that’s an option I guess), so that limits the version of RubyGems I can use, which limits the version of Rails… but I don’t know the right version of Rails… yet.

I’ll get this all sorted out at some point.

[Update]
It turns out I was missing irb and rdoc, once I installed those packages I was able to update to the latest version of RubyGems and Rails. To recap, if you need to install RoR on FC2, download and install the following packages from FC3:

  • irb-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • ruby-docs-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • rdoc-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • ruby-libs-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • ruby-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • ruby-mode-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • ruby-devel-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm
  • ruby-tcltk-1.8.4-1.fc3.i386.rpm

Filed under: Rails, webdev

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