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Learning Programming

June 28, 2006

We probably don’t want to learn English the Japanese way but if we are interested to do some computer programming or simply get ourselves acquainted with some modern day technology in web application development, we may have to turn to the Japanese. Ruby is a scripting language originated from Japan. Combined it with Rails, we have Ruby on Rails – if you haven’t heard all the hype about it, take a spin and it should get you interested in writing codes, or at very least give you a fun experience in building your own recipe book in 10 minutes.

Ruby, similar to php, perl or java which most of us would likely have come across when setting up a web site, was created by Yukihiro Matsumoto. According to Matsumaoto San, Ruby is one of the most popular scripting languages in Japan despite the fact that Ruby Sucks. It didn’t catch too much attention when it was released to the public domain back in 1995, most probably because of its lack of documentation in English.

Rails is a web application framework, like .NET framework (basically, it is a set of tools designed to ease the task of web application development). It doesn’t do anything particularly exotic but it was build for Ruby. You can Ruby without Rails but Rails will simplify your tasks.

Setting up RoR should be easier enough even for a computer novice (provided of course, you use Rails build-in web server. Things can get a little messy once you start venturing into IIS or try to get fastcgi working under IIS). Users of XP can make use of Ruby’s one-click installer followed by gem install rails. Linux users can apt-get or yast2 Ruby and then gem install Rails.

In my Suse 10.0 box, I have configured Ruby on Rails under Apache2. Here is what I did to make it work.

Posted to Web at June 28, 2006 12:55 PM :    Furl It!    del.icio.us

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