RoR in Visual Studio 2005: 3 easy steps
Ruby is one of those wonderful gems that has been getting people excited for quite some time, but it hasn't been until the Rails framework has been released that the majority of Ruby users fell in love with it. Developing with Ruby on Rails enables you to get fully functional web-apps up and running in literally no time. What's Rails? It's a brilliant MVC implementation, using the Active Record pattern to map domain objects to your persistence layer:
"Rails is a web-application and persistence framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web-applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern of separation."
Most of the demos you'll see for Ruby on Rails (RoR) will be shown on a mac. The guys use Textmate and it all looks wicked-cool-and-mind-blowing. It's enough to make you run to the nearest apple store and buy a MacBook Pro.
But can RoR be done on Windows, and could it possibly be as ultra-cool? After reading lots of doom-foreboding posts about running Rails in Windows, and specifically IIS, you might loose heart. But fear not, me hearties, because it took about 5 minutes to get RoR running on my XPSP2 box.
-
Download and install InstantRailsThis will install
Apache HTTP Server,
mySql,
Ruby,
phpMyAdmin, the
InstantRails server management tool and some sample RoR apps. (This step takes care of just about most your required installations in one go).
Here's a screenshot to illustrate the simplicity of the InstantRails management application:
- Install mySql client tools (optional)
If you don't like phpMyAdmin, download the mySql client tools.
- Install RubyInSteel.
To enable you to develop in Ruby right from within Visual Studio, get your hands on this great tool from SapphireSteel. It allows you to create new Ruby-type projects from within Visual Studio 2005, following the Rails standards:
It gives you syntax-colouring, deployment options, issuing Rake commands, and the ability to watch variables at runtime, set breakpoints, step through code, etc:
Change your Ruby In Steel Configuration to point to the correct paths in the InstantRails install location. (You only need to change your MySQL- and Ruby paths).