Hi, Ruby!

In the last couple of months, I've more or less completed my target of revising the basic concepts of Perl, Python and PHP. So I decided to check out a relatively newer member of the Open Source Programming Languages family. Ruby, along with the Rails framework that is based on it, has captured the imagination of web developers worldwide.

Ruby is said to be a truly object-oriented language that is easy to learn, and has rich libraries that are easy to extend. The Rails framework includes everything that you would need to create a database-driven web application using the MVC pattern. As it needs minimal configuration, you can develop applications faster than with other frameworks.

At least that's what the tutorials say. Today I'll put these statements to the test by (a) learning the basics of Ruby, (b) installing Ruby, (c) running a Hello World program, (d) running a simple Embedded Ruby program, (e) installing and testing the Rails framework, and (f) creating a Rails + MySQL version of my good ol' music database project.

Note that I'll follow the "Ruby on Rails Introduction" tutorial on tutorialspoint.com, which was the first Ruby tutorial I found, and use their sample code. After going through the first few pages of this tutorial, I installed Ruby from http://rubyinstaller.org/

I then tested the Hello World program and the simple Embedded Ruby program from the tutorial. Next, I tried to install the Rails framework using the "gem" utility that comes with Ruby. This utility can be used to install Ruby packages, called "Gems".

But I ran into an error during the Rails installation, due to the absence of the necessary build tools for the 'atomic' native gem. To get around this issue, I had to first install the Ruby Developer Kit. I downloaded the installer from the same URL as Ruby - http://rubyinstaller.org/ - and then followed the step by step installation instructions given by http://learnwebtutorials.com/.

(Note: An easier way is to visit the RailsInstaller website and install Ruby, Rails and many other packages at one go)

Next I had to create a demo Rails project as given in the tutorial, run the WEBrick web server that is bundled with Rails, and test the demo page from my browser. Note that the right command to create a demo Rails project is "rails new demo" and not "rails demo" as given in the tutorial. Also, the right commands to start the WEBrick web server are "cd demo" followed by "rails server". In both these cases, the commands given in the tutorialspoint.com web tutorial seem to be outdated ones.

Thus I've completed 5 of my 6 objectives for today, viz.: (a) learnt the basics of Ruby, (b) installed Ruby, (c) ran a Ruby Hello World program, (d) ran a simple Embedded Ruby program, and (e) installed and tested the Rails framework. Creating a Rails + MySQL version of my music database project will take more study and, quite possibly, a lot of trial and error. So I'll try and complete that objective later this week. Meanwhile let me search for some more good Ruby tutorials on the Web.