Rails & Beyond

First note: IE6 is dead. In fact for all of my sites I want to just redirect user to a Download Chrome page if their browser is IE6. Not friendly. But that's just me. There is a stage wherein we should all just stop caring about these browsers.

OT:

BTW, I hate debugging for IE browsers. That is something I do not love to do at all but I've done so many times in my career. Fixing other UI designers work. It shouldn't have been my job but I did it anyway.

HTML5 should work well in IE7 + browsers with some javascript code.

I just bought HTML5 and CSS3 book from A Book Apart.

Hopefully this will help me move forward soon.

Two popular templating formats in Rails are HAML and ERB. I did not use HAML initially because it was too DRY. That was my initial reaction to the new language. Or it was for people who put too much emphasis on "Don't Repeat Yourself" philosophy. But Jesse Crockett and his project forced me to learn HAML and somehow I don't regret that. I use HAML for all Ruby projects. But I also use ERB and I will explain why a bit later.

HAML is great and I was wrong. I realized I have an aversion towards unreadable code. I did not see myself reading and writing CFML tags for a long time that is why I gave up my job to be a bum (not really). Seriously I also hate Dreamweaver. Why do they create these products? There are always better open source alternatives.

Indenting and Outdenting

How did they learn Rails?

"They" are the core team. Click here to check out their interesting answers.

How did I learn Rails?

I learned as I got new projects. I found myself grappling with e-commerce application issues (not just Rails applications, those monolithic PHP apps too). I really love reinventing the e-commerce wheel so I am building my own platform.

Did I start with the language or did I start with the framework?

Simultaneously learned both.

I am new to Rails. Do I need to read a book?

Highly suggest doing so and start reading the DHH book. The Agile Web Development With Rails book written by David. I knew someone who said he knew Rails without reading ANY book, but naturally he googled the concepts behind Rails because I don't think he's a genius at all.

The most important concepts behind Rails are MVC, REST, DRY, ORM (ActiveRecord).

"The Git source code control system continues to win over developers who are impressed with the speed and flexibility of the distributed workflow."

The best guides to git are actually free.

Github Guides

Setting up a remote git repository is also very simple. So rather than paying for github private repository, you can just set it up on the server.


mkdir project.git
cd project.git
git --bare init


On you local project folder, do:


git init (if git is not yet initialized)
git remote add origin user@servername.com:~/project.git


There's a rather lengthy guide which is written for teams using git. Click here to check Git Internals PDF.

This is an important post, friends. You cannot use Windows if you want to be a cool Ruby programmer. Someone said it is an "exercise in futility" to even try. He is seriously right.

Please consider reading the Free Ubuntu ebook if you are new to Linux. Don't worry it's been over 2 years and I am still newbie to Linux. LOL.

Ubuntu Jaunty is a stable release but in 10 days, Karmic Koala will be released. I always choose 32-bit option because I really don't have too many resources to run 64-bit.

Check this out:

TOOLS OF TRADE

We nearly have the same setup except that I use Songbird as my music player and I still use Adobe products via Windows XP on VirtualBox for designing. Google has funded the effort to make Adobe products work with Wine (for running Windows apps on Linux) but I personally feel that is best to go with what already works at the moment.

RUBYISTS GUIDE TO LINUX DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

sudo apt-get install git-core gitk

This will install GIT and the GUI tool for Git. He had a typo on his post.

Drupal is an interesting platform. There have been several successful projects that were built using Drupal like Amazee.com. We all think of Drupal as a CMS because it is primarily a CMS but it is also a framework in the sense that it is possible to extend the CMS and develop modules for new features.

In my official blog site, I wrote a post on how to deploy a Drupal site using git and capistrano. I will soon add more tips on Git and Capistrano for PHP and Drupal developers.