I finished Curt Hibbs’ first Rolling with Ruby on Rails tutorial today. After getting phpMyAdmin installed, doing the database parts of the tutorial went a lot more quickly. Before I tackle part two, I need to read this post by Amy Hoy.
After this brief tutorial on building a database-backed website with Ruby on Rails, I like the way it works. While I didn’t find the development process quite as simple as the screencasts portrayed it, I can definitely see using it as a rapid application prototyping tool. Even with the hurdles posed by installing and configuring PHP and phpMyAdmin on top of learning Ruby and Rails, getting from page 1 to a completed application didn’t take much time.
I still want to try out the Ruby plug-in for the Eclipse IDE to see how that compares with with SciTe and the command line.