Digging for rubies and gems
Off and on for the last couple years I have been reading articles here and there about Ruby. This seemed interesting especially since Smalltalk was my first true love in terms of programming (circa ’85). But I had not touched Smalltalk since ’97 during my years at Project Eagle (Accenture then Andersen Consulting). Since then I have mostly used Java and C#, with a touch of occasional Javascript and PHP here and there. But when frequently reading that Ruby had elements of Smalltalk, Java, Perl PHP and Python all rolled into one, I decided to seriously kick the tires recently (at the end of December).If YOU want to try this out no commitment-asked, go here to try it … in your own browser. It’s really fun.
Anyway, after downloading it and playing around I decided that I was going to use it on my web site. Since it seemed that my host had a version of Ruby, I figured that would be easy. “Hélas!” this was not meant to be. This was an old and incomplete configuration. To really move forward I figured I would have to install it myself! Most of the Google searches on installation seemed to be geared towards installs on dedicated hosts, not shared hosts (where you can only install under your own directory, not /usr/lib).
I started by downloading the source and trying to compile it on my host (after having to download a couple Unix utilities). But found out some incompatibility with my host’s configuration of OpenSSL. I ended up having to merge some recent patch from the Ruby subversion repository! Eventually I got a “clean compile”! And at one point, bingo I had a working version. At that time I had a vanilla Ruby, that is with the interpretor and quite a lot of class libraries.
But I was still missing Gems, a very smart package installation and configuration system. This is important since all Ruby developers only package their code as “gems”, units of packaging which can be easily downloaded and installed (with their dependencies – that’s where the “smart” come in). So I installed Gem.
The next big step was to install Rails, an incredibly powerful framework for Ruby web apps. A little Gem magic et voilà ! I was then able to create and host my first basic Rails app. See an upcoming page on Ruby detailing the whole process.
The “ruby mine” is now fully operational! :-)
