Getting started with Ruby on Rails

I am a professional web and user-interface designer working as the Usability Design Manager for MyKnowledgeMap in York, UK. My strong art & design background coupled with a solid knowledge of systems development and programming techniques puts me in a unique position to develop interfaces that are both aesthetically pleasing and functionally intuitive.

Taking time away from working on projects for such clients as the NHS, The RSPB, The Chartered Management Institute, GHD and a number of further and higher education institutions, this site is my personal playground, portfolio and blog.

Why's it gone pink?
d13design has gone pink for October in support of Breast Cancer Awareness!
“Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research. But to be clear, raising money isn’t the primary purpose of this web event. The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that knowledge and tell someone else what you’ve learned.”

Click here to find out more!

“I’ve been quite excited by Ruby on Rails for a while now but I’ve never actually had enough time to sit down and figure things out. Well, recently I plucked up the courage and delved in.
There’s tons of tutorials out there helping you get set up and coding with Rails but I found many of [...]”

This was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 as a blog post and is tagged with development, rails.

I’ve been quite excited by Ruby on Rails for a while now but I’ve never actually had enough time to sit down and figure things out. Well, recently I plucked up the courage and delved in.

There’s tons of tutorials out there helping you get set up and coding with Rails but I found many of the a little hard to follow and, being a designer more than a programmer, I found myself going round in circles with a lot of trial and error. I finally got myself sorted and I thought it might be useful for other people in my boat if I blogged about just what I did.

This post will tell you how I got my Windows based development environment sorted and subsequent blogs will talk you through some of the first little projects I undertook.

Installing Ruby

The first step I took was to actually get the base language (Ruby) installed–I did this using an all-in-one installer called InstantRails (http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl). This was a quick way to get most of the bits I needed set up but, in my trial and error I found some other cool tools. So, after unzipping InstantRails to my hard drive I fired it up and told it “not to run automatically when Windows launches”.

Setting up a database

The next step for my set up was to sort out a database server. I decided on MySQL for a couple of reasons:

I was already familiar with it as I’ve been using MySQL for a few years now
It’s the main database format support by my web host (Dreamhost*)

* I hope to discuss setting up Rails on Dreamhost soon, once I’ve got my own head around it!

The MySQL (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html) set up was quick and easy and I also installed the GUI tools (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html) as well, just in case.

Establishing a development environment

My first dabblings with Ruby on Rails made use of InstantRails and the command prompt but I soon found this confusing, especially as all I really wanted to do was get to grips with the language. It was this that led me to discover Aptana Studio (http://www.aptana.com/studio). This is a great, free development environment built on the Eclipse Java Framework. The great thing about Aptana is it has a neat Rails plugin called RadRails (http://www.aptana.com/rails/).

So, first I installed Aptana Studio and when that was complete I fired it up. Luckily the Aptana start page within the application had a handy link to install RadRails so I clicked it and let the update run.

Now, at some point either during the RadRails installation or when I created my first project I was told that I didn’t have Ruby installed and that a bundled JRuby would be used. As part of the warning I was given the chance to locate an existing Ruby installation, I did and navigated to the ruby folder as part of InstantRails. Once located, I set this to my default Ruby interpreter.

Creating your first Rails project

Once everything’s installed and you’ve re-booted your machine you can head into Aptana Studio and create your first Rails project. To do this, select File > New > Project and locate “Rails Project” in the options. When asked, provide the following details:

Project name — whatever you want your project to be called, “blog” for instance
Location — I just stuck with the default
Generate skeleton — you want this ticked, it’ll save a bunch of work
Database — set this to MySQL (if that’s the one you’re using)
Rails version — leave this set to “latest”
Server — I tend to use WEBrick rather than Mongrel and I tick to have the server start automatically

After you’ve added all that, click “finish” and your Rails application should build and start!

If you’ve been successful you should see a page similar to that above displayed within the Aptana internal browser. Congratulations, you’re rolling on Rails!