Post by Bob LehmanWhat is the best way to get started with rails/ruby?
You've gotten a good start -- my usual response to this would be to
get in touch with your local Ruby programmers' group. Participating in
either a hackfest or a short hands-on training workshop is a good way
to jumpstart your Ruby and/or Rails hacking, too, since it can really
help to have more experienced folks in the room to whom you can direct
questions.
Post by Bob LehmanMy current ruby plan
- Switch all scripting assignments at work to it that I can get away
with -:). Probably have to use Jruby on HP.
So the question here is the question. Has anyone got the HP UX-11
port working ? If so what is the performance like?
I have jruby running, but it is a bit sluggish.
JRuby is going to be slow for anything terminal-based, compared to
plain Ruby, since the overhead of starting up the Java runtime for
every invocation is much higher. HP-UX is certainly a bit exotic
compared to the standard Ruby development platforms most of us use,
(probably OS X, Linux, and Windows, in order of popularity amongst the
group) but it should be POSIX-y enough to get a basic runtime up and
going.
Post by Bob LehmanMy Rails plan
- Building simple contacts application
How do you figure out what the best technology stack to use. I see all
the following stuff and get kind of glazed over. [...]
Stick with what works for you. If you're a NetBeans expert, 'cause
you're already doing a bunch of Java, find the best set of Ruby
plugins you can for that environment, and get going. If you're a
hardcore shell-head, and have your .vimrc file all decked out, stick
with it, and just add the syntax files and macros you need to work
Ruby and Rails into your workflow.
As for which add-ons for Rails you should consider, I'd recommend
getting a couple of projects that just use the "vanilla" Rails package
under your belt before you start adding on the hot extension du jour.
Many of those packages are basically used as sandboxes for folks to
experiment with features that *might* be worth implementing in
rails-core at a later date, but only a few ever become part of the
mainstream distrubtion, and most (IMO, anyway) tend to wither on the
vine after a year or two.
Post by Bob LehmanTo give some context to the question above.
[...]
In pure ruby I am going to build some system admin type tools. I could
use nagios, hobbit or something else along that line, but I kind of want
the excuse to write the scripts. I found one system admin tool written
in ruby, but it looked like a commercial offering. But if there is
something I would be happy to hack around with it as a starting point.
Otherwise it seems like a good exuse to write networking, parsing and
system code.
Before re-implementing all that, you might want to take a look at
Puppet, which is a cross-platform (well, if all your platforms are
UNIX-like, anyway) configuration management system implemented in
Ruby. It uses a similar "recipe" syntax to cfengine, which is one of
the more popular open-source configuration mgmt. tools out there, but
extending it is obviously much easier, since you can work in Ruby.
There's also a fair bit of stuff that sounds like it would naturally
fit into an SNMP monitoring solution, which might make the Ruby
snmplib project (http://snmplib.rubyforge.org/) worth checking out.
Post by Bob Lehman[...]
In rails I want to build some simple apps to
- Contact Manager
- link to mapping tool via address
- Asset manager
- help with all the hardware we have scattered about
- Name
- Location
- Address
...
Both pretty simple master detail(s) applications. I would like to put a
pretty front end on and build up the knowledge of the tools
These both sound like pretty standard Rails "first applications" --
i.e., you get to build the database from scratch to match
ActiveRecord's assumed table and column naming conventions, and get to
take maximum advantage of Rails' support for quick prototyping of CRUD
(create/read/update/delete) web wrappers around simple database.
Post by Bob LehmanOnce I become more proficient I would probably write a nice webbish
front end to the system admin tools.
We should talk more about this, once you make some progress, as I've
been slowly replacing our hodge-podge of Perl and shell scripts at
work with a slightly-less-disorganized collection of Ruby, and
bringing more and more tolls up behind web interfaces as I go. It
would be interesting to have collaborators on that kind of
modernization effort...
-Lennon