If your looking at doing a ruby on rails installation on your Mac, make sure you understand where all these new applications are being installed on your system and how to make your rails installation unbreakable.

Many developers from beginners to advanced are trying ruby on rails. If your like me, you’ll be doing most of your rails coding on a Mac. If you were a Windows user who has recently switched to the Mac for Rails development, you might find the amount of terminal usage in Rails development a little intimidating.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to work with a corporate company running UNIX so I had the opportunity to learn enough UNIX basics to be reasonably comfortable working with the terminal and the command line in Mac OSX.

If your installing Ruby on Rails on your Mac, then Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic has the best tutorials to get the installation done right. Dan really knows his stuff when it comes to that sometimes terrifying terminal, so you’ll find his installation guides a breath of fresh air.

Before you start that rails installation, I encourage you to read Dan’s article on setting your applications to install in usr/local rather than the default. The more you understand about why things are done the way they are, the easier you’ll find the rest of your rails experience.

“A word of advice to all ASP.Net developers who read this, don’t use Ruby on Rails. It will only make you realize how bad you’ve got it ;)”

Daniel’s Stuff » Blog Archive » ASP.Net blows chunks

I saw an interesting post by Daniel Parnell about how ASP.NET just wasn’t the same after trying Ruby on Rails for web application development. There is a fair amount of opinion about which is better and so far to me it seems that Ruby and Rails seems to have the upper hand as I’ve seen a number of developers make the switch from ASP.NET to Rails.

Personally I’ve never had any experience with ASP.NET and after reading many other developers comments about switching to rails, don’t really plan to either.

Also there is this talk by Dave Thomas at Railsconf 2006.

What’s your thoughts.

Blogged with Flock

If your like me you just can’t help playing with new technologies. Since I started working with the web it has been a whirlwind ride with so much happening that it can be mind blowing. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, some new buzz pops up. The web is a truly dynamic medium that is constantly evolving and trying to keep up with all the new technologies makes it that much more interesting.

Sydney FX started with web design back in 2004 but these days I spend more time studying new web technologies like ruby on rails, flex and the new AIR from Adobe and sometimes you need costly editors to assist you in speeding up your development time.

Well now there is an IDE that is multi platform so no matter if your working on Windows, Apple, or Linux, there is a release just for you.

Now I haven’t been using Aptana for very long but I have now installed it on both my Windows and Linux platforms mainly for Rails development because there are very few good editors that meet the needs of rails programmers straight out of the box. Most mac users including myself use the Textmate however Aptana is great if you can’t spare the money for a mac or need an alternative editor when you don’t have a mac handy or don’t want a mac altogether.

I’ve seen a number of custom setups for text editors on linux which look great however you’ll need to know how to get the editor to suit your needs. If you don’t have that knowledge then check out Aptana. It’s really cool, and can be used for all the latest web technology programming like Ajax, HTML, AIR, and even iPhone.

Aptana is an open source project founded by Paul Colton who has been involved in a number of successful technologies in previous ventures. Check out more of Aptana at the official website.