Rails Tips & Tricks
Posted by benrobb on January 5th, 2007
Over two years ago, I had a summer job programming in Ruby on Rails. I had never used Ruby or Rails before, but was familiar with the MVC framework and had used it in a J2EE environment programming with Eclipse, Tomcat, etc. They told me to read up on Ruby and Rails for a week (while I was on vacation) and they’d see me in one week. Going from J2EE to Rails was a dramatic change, and I learned to love the absolute simplicity of Rails. The product of my efforts over the summer was http://filmfury.com.
I went back to school when the summer was over and became a TA for the programming class I had completed the previous semester. Teaching Java was alright, but I took every opportunity to expound on the virtues of Rails while forgetting how to do everything because I was no longer programming for a living.
Recently, I decided to build my family website from scratch in Rails. I partly wanted to reacquaint myself with Rails, but also felt that Joomla! was just to bulky and obfuscated when it came to making changes. When I had come onto the FilmFury project, the basic website was already in place, and as I started my own apps from scratch, I came across many little issues that I had never run into before. My objective is to capture all these minor discoveries into a Rails Cheat Sheet that may be helpful to others. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll be managing this yet, but I think I’ll blog each discovery as I come across them, and then keep a conglomerated list somewhere. I’ll update the post with links as needed.