Ruby on Rails

After about a year in the making, Rails 2.0 was finally released in Dec 2007. It is supposedly stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish, although I must say I have yet to dive into it. As much as I welcome new features into Rails, I am still trying to learn the old features which are still 'new' features to me. Having started in Ruby on Rails about a year ago, developed an Intranet with it and a couple of small projects, I still find myself trying to get a grip on Rails. As such the old features are still being discovered by myself, as I started to get to be familiar with them in my projects.

Working with Ruby on Rails, I often have a hard time remembering most of the Rake commands. So I have decided to create a cheatsheet for my own reference that I know where to access. Hopefully it will be useful to others too.

Commands in red are only available in Rails 2.0

Today I have decided to update my Ruby Gem software from version 0.9.5 to 1.0.1. I have previously updated my Rails from version 1.2.3 to 1.2.6. And since my Ruby Gem is a couple of version behind, I thought I should do the same. It is a straight forward process that involves just one command line. (on my Ubuntu installation) Simple enough.

I have been learning a PHP framework called cakePHP for more than 6 months and has written an application on it - iSignin.com which I am quite proud of. Wrote that app while learning cakePHP, MVC framework concepts, etc from scratch. It was a good learning experience. Then I decided to take on ROR (Ruby n Rails) thinking that since it is also a MVC framework and has many similarities in concepts to cakePHP, why not? And these days there have been so many talk and news about ROR.

Well I have to say that other than the similarities in the MVC concepts, the differences are quite significant. Basically learning a new language. In trying to learn a new language while constantly refering to the old one can be a challenge really. Especially when you naturally think how you accomplish the task in the old one while at the same time translating to the new one. Being one without much patience in sitting down to read up the programming book, I tend to want to learn by just diving right into it.