Musings…

I was curious on how fast is it to do a web application with Ruby on Rails. They say it is really fast compared to creating a Java web application.

After some searching over the net, I found Locomotive. Locomotive is a pre-packaged application which bundles all the requirements of a Rails web application. It aims to get you started with Ruby on Rails minus the headache. It is self-contained. It can even run with the other ruby installations. Too bad it only runs on a Mac. I didn’t wait any longer and installed it in my machine. Installation is a breeze. Just click and drag it to the applications directory. The interface to control running instances of rails apps is straightforward.

After that I looked for some tutorials, I found this article the easiest to understand.

http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~matuszek/wiki700/index.php?n=Main.Locomotive

It took me maybe less than an hour to create my first Rails application. Hmmm…I don’t even have background with Rails! I was amazed how fast it can be done. Actually, I was stuck because my crappy text editor couldn’t save the proper filename. Dang! It could just have been a few minutes. Haha! The sample is not just the simple Hello World thingy but it has some database stuff wherein the users are able to do the usual CRUD routine from the web browser.

Rails is very interesting. I think I’ll use this thing for my pet projects. hehehe