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

Ruby Is Groovy

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Jobs: Ruby is groovy man. It's got like, vibe. We had to get in on that.

Gates: C# with .NET offers more flexibility with less development worries and higher performance...

Jobs: Man! Talk about Squaresville! Ruby is hip man! It's a love machine. A child of the earth.

Torvalds: Ruby is based on perl, which is in turn based on bash scripting, which I like.

Jobs: You see man! Ruby is a free spirit. It grows in like, the sunshine. It doesn't obey your rules!

Gates: But it's just another paradigm. .NET can accomplish all the same....

Jobs: On Rails man! Rails!!! It's like hyperspeed into the cosmos. And that's why its fit for Apple's attention. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go get some podcasts over rss, browse some blogs, do some yoga. You dig?

***Jobs walk's away clicking fingers rhythmicly***

Gates: But it's all just flash and hype. Nothing really new is going on! .NET does all this! Why won't anyone listen? You believe me right?

Torvalds: Look man. I really just don't give a shit.

Another great tutorial, but....

[MrByte420]

The authors of rails books need to stop writing tutorials and write some comprehensive documentation. Even the page is quite lacking.

For example, suppose you have a time field, not a date field, no year, just time. And you want to create that element in your webform.

If it were date, you'd use date_select, pass it the name of the object and the name of the field, and your done, you get a nice input box. Suppose you want the same thing for time, its still date select with a series of discard attributes, e.g.

date_select('meeting','starttime', :discard_year => true)

However, you as the person looking for the documentation for this are led on somewhat of a goose chase becuase your time input box information is not even close to what you'd expect (time_select perhaps?) and you should be looking under "date" for "time".

(Incidentally, Rails 1.0 has a bug where it seems to ignore :discard_year so the whole exercise is quite fustrating when you do find the docs, but i can live with bugs that will be fixed)

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).