danielbray

Right, so I wanted to learn that whole Ruby on Rails thing, and I figured the best thing to do would be to throw myself in at the deep(ish) end and do something big(ish).

So, the plan is to do some kind of automatically cross-referenced bloggy/wiki kind of thing; where people can log in, create/edit articles, give these articles tags, and then, whenever any article contains these tags, have them link automatically into each other.

I figured that this would be simple enough that it wouldn’t take too long to do, and be complicated enough that I would actually learn something from it, namely:

• User management.
• Session management.
• Database management.
• And some (slightly) complicated GUI rendering.

I figured that this would be enough to be getting on with, and that I should have some idea of how Ruby on Rails works.

As I go along, I’ll be keeping track of any interesting Ruby/Rails links I find on http://del.icio.us/braindelay/ruby, but for now, this is what I’m looking at to do this:

• InstantRails is a bondoogle that will allow you to get up and running pretty quickly, and will have you writing your hello world in about five minutes.
• OnLamp have a good tutorial called Rolling with Ruby on Rails that’ll have you doing database interactions five minutes later.

Thats all for now, I don’t have a design in my head for this yet, but I do have requirements (kind of) which is always a good start.