master Rails

I spent three days last week at an Advanced Rails Studio put on by Pragmatic Studio. I spent the days in the studio, then the evenings coding away.

For my level of proficiency (I was probably at the lower end of what was appropriate for their material) I found it to be extremely useful.

One step closer to what I would consider “mastery”.

I’ve had a bit of spare time to take in some archive episodes of Railscast. Most of them are pretty useful.

I came up with my personal definition of mastery as a security professional. I realized there was no longer any joy in browsing the security books at the bookstore, because there were no useful security books there for me. There might be the odd useful chapter here or there, but by and large every book had stuff I already new. I was no longer learning the field, but growing with it as it grew via online sources.

So now I’m shooting for the same level of mastery with Rails, agile development, project management, and business.

Everyone is free to follow my code blog on this journey.

http://www.theopensourceguys.com/wordpress/

This blog is mainly technical and deals solely with Rails, ruby and associated technologies I’ll be using (ActiveWarehoure, Mongrel, Rake etc)

Incidentally this ties in with my “mastering Ruby” and “Changing my Corporations way of Thinking…” things.

Rails is so cool, you have to think of reasons not to use Rails in your project. Even if you’re a plumber.

So I started with the intention of just seeing what this Ruby on Rails thing is… and for the past 3 days I have been up till 5am!

I am using Agile Web Development, Ruby for Rails Developers.

I think for someone into web applications, I see myself designing my first Rails app in about 3 weeks time.

Solid stuff this! anyone here want to collaborate on writing a rails app?

Design. I absolutely must finish the design of my first rails app. Right now I am spending a good deal of rails time just messing with snippets to see what works and what does not.

Enough already!

Time for some serious work to begin.

Setting up Ruby and Rails
Installing required packagesFirst you’ll have to get the required ruby packages:

deb http://www.sgtpepper.net/hyspro/deb ./
deb-src http://www.sgtpepper.net/hyspro/deb ./

apt-get install libgems-ruby libgems-ruby1.8

gem install rails

rails ;

/path/to/your_application
    app/
    config/
    db/
    doc/
    lib/
    log/
    public/
    script/
    test/
    vendor/
    CHANGELOG
    README
    Rakefile

cd your_application
ruby script/server

ServerName some_name
DocumentRoot /path/to/your_application/public/
ErrorLog /path/to/your_application/log/apache.logOptions ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your_application

/etc/init.d/apache reload

127.0.0.1 localhost some_name

apt-get install libapache-mod-fastcgi
apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8

apt-get install libapache2-mod-fastcgi
apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8

FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc/

RewriteBase /dispatch.cgi

RewriteBase /dispatch.fcgi