Ruby, Rails & AJAX

De-Railed! Only 10 months to go…

komodocode — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 21:25:08 +0000

Haven't touched Ruby, Rails or AJAX in 2 solid months, now my 1 year goal has been reduced by 20%. Time to get after it again, this time with a PLAN!

The Motherlode: Ruby on Rails Wiki

komodocode — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 11:48:53 +0000

Dang – Struck gold again! I just found the Ruby on Rails wiki and, man, is it loaded with lots of RoR goodness. Howtos, videos, discussions, plugins, best practices, theories, case studies and blogs – lots of blogs! And since it's a wiki, I felt compelled to add this blog to the list – toward the bottom Check it out.

Rails Developer Shortage

komodocode — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 06:16:48 +0000

Peter Cooper writes about a very encouraging phenomenon for people like me who are breaking into Ruby on Rails coding. I'm beginning to think that taking a year to learn is too long. Maybe I'll get "up to speed" in a month or two and work on the rest of the year to master it.

A Brave New “Hello World!”

komodocode — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 06:01:49 +0000

OK, so I have gotten the ceremonial "Hello World!" done in Ruby on Rails. Very straightforward 5-step process and I love the way Rails creates the entire directory structure using a simple command. I'm looking forward to learning other helper scripts. I just read Jakob Sklerning's Mentalized blog that mentioned the simple "Hello World!" program consumes 30MB of RAM to run. BWAH???

A little research of my own revealed that launching the WEBrick web server (Rails 1.1) takes up 23 MB of memory, but running the "Hello World!" program costs next to nothing that I could see. If anyone has any insight into Jakob's statement, I'd love to learn about it.

BTW, Jakob has a great how-to on running "Hello World!"

Some Alternate Tools

komodocode — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 04:36:55 +0000

Even though, the latest Ruby installer comes with a built-in web server for development, I skipped ahead and started reading "Four Days on Rails" which suggested using Apache2. I decided to install it as it will probably be the second most web server I will be deploying next to IIS.

Also, MySQL-Front is a great tool for setting and viewing MySQL databases, however after 30 days, it's not free ($35 for 2 licenses). Always striving to hold the banner of Open Source software as high as I can, I found a free (with nagware) alternative in a product called SQLYog. It's very decent and the limitations (so far) are easy to overcome.

Up and “Rolling with Ruby on Rails”

komodocode — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 20:01:29 +0000

Part One of Curt Hibbs' article by above mentioned name starts out by giving a very succinct 4-step blueprint on retrieving and installing all of the software needed to get rolling.

Done – in no more than 15 minutes. Follow Curt's article, however, for the full "How-To".

A Couple of Bookmark-worthy Blogs

komodocode — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 13:30:36 +0000

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails.

Bill Scott is the AJAX evangelist at Yahoo!

Komodo Coder, author of a fast-growing blog about Ruby, Rails & AJAX (shameless, I know)

AJAX Tutorials for Beginners

komodocode — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 04:08:48 +0000

Another collection of useful tutorials compiled by Rushi Vishavadia – right in my own WordPress back yard. At this rate, I'll never get to bed!

For starters

komodocode — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 03:36:15 +0000

I am not a programmer – yet. This is a blogged challenge to see if I can become a Ruby on Rails and AJAX Wizard in my spare time within 12 months using only guidance from resources scattered about the internet (tutorials, podcasts, blogs, forums, email newsletters, etc.)

Show your support by reading, subscribing and commenting – a lot!