Re: More Impressions of Ruby on Rails

That's a good update, Jerome.  Sorry, but I didn't pay enough attention to the 
titles and authors of the Ruby & Rails books.  But there was one author named 
Marcel Gagne http://www.marcelgagne.com and he wrote a book titled Moving to 
Ubuntu Linux, which was very impressing to me.  So many computer books are 
tedious to read, but Marcel Gagne's style is clear and engaging, and he makes a 
good case for Ubuntu Linux and the community supporting it.  Ubuntu Linux is 
geared as a desktop replacement to Windows.

Nathan.


----- Original Message ----
From: Jerome Hughes <jromeh@xxxxxxx>
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 11:49:30 AM
Subject: Re: [WEB400] More Impressions of Ruby on Rails

Thanks for the report on your research, Nathan. What books have you  
been looking at?

On 9/19 was one of three board member presenters who shared the OMNI  
Dinner Meeting presentation time, went last and presented an overview  
of Ruby on Rails, followed by a demonstration of building a simple  
application with CRUD capabilities provided by first a dynamic and  
then a generated scaffold. Was intending to add another linked table  
in the demo, but got a little off track and didn't really have time  
to do so.

To finish up, showed my current version of the tutorial application  
from "Agile Web Development with Rails" which includes AJAX  
replacements of page elements (coded with a couple lines of Ruby that  
generate the Javascript and XML needed to make it happen) and  
Javascript effects from the Scriptaculous library add-ins like "blind  
down" (gradually showing a page element like in a powerpoint  
presentation) and "highlight element" (a color brighten and fade)  
that were also implemented in just a couple of lines of Ruby code  
that makes use of others' work to generate on the client the  
Javascript defined on the server.

Also, while presenting this on my Mac, the "ringer" in the audience  
with some Rails knowledge pointed to a peecee environment known as  
"Instant Rails" that along with tutorials like Curt Hibbing's  
"Rolling with Ruby on Rails" at onlamp.com could very easily move  
someone who's learned a bit from reading about this stuff to doing  
it. It's...

http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/

...a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails,  
Apache, and MySQL, all pre-configured and ready to run. No  
installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and  
run it. It does not modify your system environment.

No less impressed with RoR, still moving forward with it for a couple  
of my own uses. The chirb (chicago ruby users group) is meeting 10/9  
on the JRuby technology, which allows running Ruby in the JVM. Sun  
has hired the two main JRuby maintainers to work on the project full  
time. Hope to attend, but may have some OMNI duties related to OMNI's  
Day of Education on 10/10 preclude it.

http://omniuser.org/DOE2006.html

--Jerome Hughes
2006 OMNI Seminar VP
http://omniuser.org/DOE2006.html