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

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.

Ever wanted to develop cool apps for the Apple Mac? Well this is another area that I have been thinking about for some time and only in the last few days have had a chance to investigate these options in a bit more detail.

After reading a few websites it seems to be that Objective-C with Cocoa is the language of choice for all new developers creating Mac apps which from my understanding is preferential to Carbon and Applescript however this is based on what I’ve read so far and may not necessarily be completely correct so feel free to make any comments about this.

After a quick look around at Cocoa resources, I found a cool Cocoa Development resource which you can find other Cocoa resources and even download a free Become and Xcoder book from Cocoa Lab with an introduction to Objective-C. There are some articles and tutorials to give you a feel of it, but you will need a Mac and the Xcode development tools to get started.

One site I found talked about Ruby & Cocoa for Mac apps… hmmm now that sounds very interesting.

But what about when you are developing on Microsoft’s Windows platform. Well after playing around with a few editors I found Notepad++ which has some remarkable similarity’s to Textmate for Apple.

The best part about Notepad++ is it’s free and it’s also open source, however you can give donations as it started and developed by Don Ho and a small group of developers. I didn’t spend a lot of time using Notepad++ mainly because I spend most of my time on a Mac however I did enjoy using it as a Ruby on Rails editor for Windows. The only thing I didn’t see was a project window which you could import your Rails project framework into for easy access.

Notepad++ has full code highlighting, use defined language including Ruby, zoom in and out, and alot more.

A great editor and well worth further investigation.

Locomotive has worked great however I’m still curious about getting Rails setup on my Mac without Locomotive which hasn’t been successful yet, however I’ve compiled a list of online documentation that I have found and listed them below hopefully saving you some time searching. Fortunately Ruby on Rails will be released with Mac OS X Leopard so hopefully all this hassle of finding up to date and relevant documentation on a successful Rails implementation will be a thing of the past.

I did however have a successful install of Ruby on Rails on a PC running Suse Linux 10.1 following Novell’s instructions on Configuring Ruby Rails for Apache on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server which was pretty easy considering I’m hardly a Linux guru but know enough about Unix to get around the terminal environment.

Here is the documentation I have found for installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X and I will update it when I found more information to keep it up to date. Keep in mind I haven’t yet been able to successfully install Ruby on Rails following these instructions but if you got a good knowledge of the Unix platform you’ll probably go better than I did.

• Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X -(2 Feb 07) This is the latest update from Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic and is a newer version of the next point below because it uses Mongrel instead of FastCGI.
• Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger (2 Dec 05 – a little out dated but it still works. I updated my Mac on 22 Nov 06 with only a few minor issues that weren’t related to the instructions)
• Installing Rails on Mac OS X Tiger (12 July 06 – Updated version, looks ok but haven’t tried it)
• Installing Rails on Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.8) (17 Oct 06 – Update of point above. Haven’t tried it yet either.)

Good Luck!

After contemplating modifying my Mac to run Ruby on Rails I decided against any system modifications. The main reason is any documentation on the web regarding installing Rails on the Mac was a little too out dated for my liking and very little support.

So what was I to do? Well I decided that using Locomotive from http://locomotive.raaum.org/ was going to be the safest and easiest option and I wasn’t wrong. Installing Locomotive was super easy and all I needed to do was download it, mount the dmg file and drag the Locomotive Icon into my Applications folder and Bingo! Ruby on Rails is ready to go.

The only thing to keep in mind is that you need to make sure you use the open up any terminals from within the Locomotive interface which is again pretty easy to remember. Locomotive at the time of this post uses the lighttpd web server by default when starting the web server using the command ruby script/server. If you prefer you can use the Webrick webserver with Locomotive by forcing it ruby script/server webrick. Supposedly Webrick is better but I’m no expert so I’m just using Webrick for any development.

The only other thing to keep in mind with Locomotive is that if you want to do more robust database work you’ll need to have MySQL installed on the Mac as the databases shipped with Locomotive aren’t really for a production environment.

Well with all the hype I thought I would start to investigate it for myself and after a search around the web found a couple of free installs for both Mac and PC. After a quick look at the Mac install I wasn’t game enough to start playing with my Mac in fear of causing unnecessary pain in the event that the install didn’t go through smoothly.

So I dug out the back up laptop and installed in a matter of minutes the Instant Rails install which was pretty simple. In actual fact the extracting the zip file was the longest process but after that it was all go.

After a few basic tests it all proved to be running no problem so now I’m off to the bookstore to get books on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

The plan now is to install Ruby and Rails on the Mac so I might even do a unedited screen recording of the install for those attempting to go down the same path.

If your interested in finding more visit the Ruby on Rails website.

“Rails”, “Ruby on Rails”, and the Rails logo are trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson.

After a quick think about how I was going to do this I put together some code that would remove the spaces.

$mobile = ” 0400 000 000″;
//echo $mobile;
$mobile = trim($mobile);
$numcount = strlen($mobile);
//echo $numcount;
$ptr=0;

while ($i <= $numcount) { //Loop until testing of all numerals in ph no
if ($mobile{$ptr} != ” “) {
$ptr++;
}else{
$mobiletemp = substr($mobile, 0, $ptr);
echo “mobiletemp:”.$mobiletemp.”\n”;
$mobile = $mobiletemp.substr($mobile,($ptr+1),$numcount);
echo “mobile :”.$mobile;
$ptr++;
};
$i++;
}

So here I was really proud of myself for cooking up such an elaborate chunk of code that would do what I needed. During the process of writing the code I posted a question on a developer forum asking for a quick way of removing the spaces. By the time I finished my piece of code I had a response from the developer forum.

And here was their solution

$mobile = str_replace ( ‘ ‘, ”, $mobile );

That’s right. Just one line of code to do the same thing as my 18 lines of code. Same solution different method.
Hopefully someone who like me needs to know how to do this in a hurry and will find this post.

The main use that I personally would use .htaccess is for search engine friendly 301 page redirects or URL rewrites. I haven’t had much hands on in either of these areas but was intrigued to learn more about how to use the .htaccess file effectively.

I’ve done a bit of Googling and come up with a few sites that offer some interesting information on the subject. Firstly posting on my blog means I can easily reference them again and secondly it might help some other newbie to .htaccess files to save some time.

Brainstorms and Raves .htaccess article
Java Script Kit Site .htaccess article
Seobook Article on SEO, 301 Redirects using .htaccess file
Tom Raftery IT Blog about .htaccess