Apple Publishes Ruby On Rails Tutorial

bonch writes "Apple has noticed the high amount of Mac usage in the Ruby on Rails community and has posted an illustrated Ruby on Rails tutorial. The document goes into more concise detail in getting new users up to speed, from database schema to moving beyond scaffolding, all done with the favored Rails editor, Textmate."

Comments

Re:Looks interesting

[lennart78]

I've been spending quite some time working on it on an OS from Redmont. I'd reckon the experience can be compared to that on any *NIX/BSD you prefer.

The main things I have to say about tools is: I haven't found the right tool. Yet.

The scintilla-based editor that comes with rails is ok, but no more than that. I'd prefer an IDE, with some project management and such. It seems like there are some possibilities with eclipse. http://www.napcs.com/howto/railsonwindows.html#_To c111133460

But I still have to check that one out...

Re:OS X Ruby doesn't work with Rails?

[skribble]

So my question is: if Apple thinks Ruby on Rails is such hot shit, why doesn't they just upgrade their version to 1.8.4 via Software Update?

Because it's probably not fully tested to work with Tiger. The only system updates you get with Software Update and bug fixes and security fixes. Occasionally you'll get something else which works behind the scenes with an updated iApp as well (there have been minor CoreImage and other framework pieces updated this way).

This is just good sense, it's stability vs. cutting edge. Also it can be a very bad thing to update the system incrementally (Ask Microsoft who have been bitten by this many times... often updating one thing can have unexpected results on others.

Also, for a developers interested in using Rails, updating Ruby is fairly trivial. I would also add that often even if Apple includes the latest version of something you may want to compile it yourself anyway (Apache, PHP. MySQL are good examples of things that people will often *upgrade* right out of the box).

Compared with Django, RoR doesn't cut it.

[Qbertino]

Hey, Guys! Get with the programm. Ruby on Rails is so last-season.
Django is where the musics at. And for good reasons too. It's more mature, easyer to use, faster in developement, less performance hungry, has a documentation that's up to date and has a grown up backend kit. It's only that they GPLd it last summer, that's why it hasn't gotten all the press yet.
And this is not to start a flamewar. Compare them both and you'll see what I mean.
The RoR and Django guys are good friends btw.

Re:Mac and Ruby history

[finnif]

No - it is a killer app for getting mentions on Slashdot. Having a development system with the relative lack of performance of Ruby, and the very close tie-in to the database and schema of Rails is more of a website killer than an killer app, I am afraid to report.

I'm with Decaff on this one. I drank the RoR kool-aid after one of the earlier posts to slashdot. The first few weeks was awesome. Then essentially what happened was I ended up trying to rip out every aspect of RoR until I was just left with Ruby... which had terrible performance.

If you're going to go with RoR, make sure you take the long view. While everyone says "it scales, because it has FastCGI", I'd really like to hear more about extreme high volume sites that are using it. How's it going for them?

Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

But google uses python. Whats wrong? Python is dying because of its boring board of directors? Missed the train?

WebObjects

[macserv]

I don't understand why someone would want to use Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X, when WebObjects comes with the developer tools, is an enterprise-class Java app server, and is way faster in both development and deployment (on Mac, Windows, Unix, or Linux) than anything else I've seen.

It really is the best kept secret in the web app world. If you've not tried it, you might want to give it a shot.

Re:OS X Ruby doesn't work with Rails?

[killjoe]

I have been going to WWDC for three years now. Every year during the feedback sessions people always ask the same things.

1) How come you hate webobjects developers so much.
2) When are you going to get a decent package management tool or formally adopt darwinports.

Every year the answers are the same.

1) We don't really hate you guys, we really love you, we neglect webobjects on purpose.
2) We are apple, neither darwinports nor pkgsrc, nor fink is good enough for us. One day we will write a really cool one just watch.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Hey, What about Catalyst

[holy zarquon's singi]

Catalyst is the hot new Perl based Model-View-Controller framework. It's been out for about a year, it's production ready easy for any competent programmer to work with, and backed by massive collection of libraries on CPAN. It has a large friendly and active user community, which you can find via the website.

Me, I'm using it for lots of things - my project of the moment is gluing in some of the tasty AI modules on CPAN into it for automatic classification.