My environment was already setup for Rails 2.3.* and Yehuda Katz’ post served as a guide to get me up to speed with the beta loveliness.

RubyGems 1.3.7 along with Thor and Bundler gems required

My installed version of RubyGems was a couple of point releases behind, so I updated that and installed the necessary gems

sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install thor bundler

Clone Edge Rails from GitHub

mkdir -p ~/code/rails/rails
git clone http://github.com/rails/rails.git ~/code/rails/rails

Generate a fresh app and install dependencies with Bundler

mkdir ~/code/rails/rails-3-demo
cd !$
ruby ~/code/rails/rails/bin/rails new . --dev
bundle install

Launch the web server

./script/rails server

Browse to http://0.0.0.0:3000 and you’re done!

As an act of deliberate practice to hone my skills with web-application development and to deepen my understanding of the Rails framework I’ve been adding to my collection of nano-apps.

A while back I had an idea to develop a URL shortener just to see how little code would be required but decided the world really didn’t need another one. With time on my hands over Easter & the curiosity of a technology entusiast I just started hacking and had a functioning prototype within a short time-frame.

I wasn’t keen on parting with my shiny pennies for a domain name considering my lack of income but I’d written the code and thought I’d may as well go the whole hog and get my work into the wild.

So, without further ado, I present io.gd . As usual, code is available on GitHub.

The catalogue loosely fits in with my series of nano-apps and is hosted on movies.stevenwilkin.com. The code is publicly available on GitHub for anyone who’s interested.

All’s left now is to actually use the system and fill in the details of my collection!

I first started playing with Rails over 2 years ago and it has taken me until now to take an app through from conception to initial deployment. And an interesting journey it has been.

When I first started investigating Rails I had never used a web framework before and the Ruby language really confused me, but there were a few things I liked. I liked the idea of convention over configuration, opinionated software and the amazing community that has built up around this set of technologies.

Not long after this, I started work on another project and considered using it as the motivation to fully get to grips with Rails, but getting the job done was more important so I headed down the PHP route, having had a bit of experience with it over the years. I’m amazed that I now have 2 years of CakePHP development experience. It gets a bad rep concerning it’s performance speed but if I’m doing any bespoke PHP work, Cake is never far away.

Deploying Rails apps a couple of years ago seemed like quite an involved process, what with application servers, web servers, proxies and clusters but now with Passenger, getting a production environment up and running is a breeze. I’ve also developed a great love for Capistrano, using it with non-Rails apps.

Calling hugagoth.com my first Rails app in the wild is a bit of a lie. When I discovered Passenger I wanted to see just how easy deployment now was so I converted my static, single-page professional site into a Rails app. A bit overkill I know as it doesn’t even do anything, but a worthwhile experiment none-the-less.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever use Rails in my current day job so I’m unsure what I’ll be doing with this framework in the future. I’ll probably convert stevenwilkin.com to run on Sinatra just for kicks and if any interesting ideas come to mind, you never know!