Ruby off the Rails

In keeping with my new years resolutions, i have been struggling to learn Ruby On Rails, so armed with an existing PHP application that i wished to replicate in rails (as a learning exercise, i do'nt recommend that you seriously consider re-factoring a mature application in rails).

This is a three fold learning exercise, first learning ruby the language, then rails, then how to run and deploy rails on Mac OS X, my operating system of choice.

One of the things i have learnt so far, is that unlike compiled languages, interpreted languages can tie you up in knots, trying to work out why something that seems to run does not do what you want it to do.

I guess the next thing i will have to learn is how to get the ruby debugger running, or i'm going to be even more prematurely bald.

So im running:

Mac OS X leopard on a MacBook, with the Apple ruby. mysqly.ab sourced MySQL 5.0.51, Aptana Studio as my IDE and Mongrel as the web server.

Getting that lot to co-exist was adventure in its own right (and may be the subject of another post), but now i have it working its a pretty slick environment, i reckon in the last 10 hours I have done as much work as would have taken me a week to get running in PHP or C++.

So off to find out how to make debugging work in the IDE, i managed it once, but only after considerable fiddling.

BTW: the new MacBooks are wicked developer workstations, the Black MacBook came with 250G Drive and 2G ram, and is as fast as hell, faster than my 3 gen MacBook Pro that i recently gave up.

Now wheres that debugger documentation :-)