I am quite familiar with PHP, so I set out to try to do the same things in rails as I would in PHP. Everything seemed to transfer over without effort… except file upload inputs. These kept me busy for quite some time, and had me wanting to pull out my hair.

I tried to make use of the community; exploring the wiki, reading through the rails cookbook, seeking out blogs that addressed the issue, visiting #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net on a regular basis. Infact, the IRC community was referring me to the wiki article (HowtoUploadFiles). No matter how I tried, the upload just wouldnt work. I had narrowed the problem down to the multipart => “true” definition, but that was about as far as I could get without help. Luckily, I know a few rails nunjas (gurus) who helped me figure out what to do.

As it turns out, the rails wiki was incorrect. Since the project is opensource, it was easy enough for me to fix the documentation (perhaps the documentation was for a previous version of rails, and hadn’t been updated), but it was still a frustrating week (I was actually only working on it maybe and hour a night, but still) especially since it was such a simple task I was trying to complete.

Hopefully there are no more hiccups like this as I go forward. I am already thinking about a cool new idea which I am excited to work on once I complete this test application.

The book covers Rails development from the beginners level to the fairly advanced. It offers an easy tutorial which one can follow along, and gives a decent amount of information about most of the features they have available.

One of the biggest features that the Rails framework offers is migration. Although it is a fairly small part of Rails, it is a technology which I know is useful to many companies. At Pason, we created our own technology that basically does the same task as migration. It would have been nice to just use the Rails’ migration instead of developing our own.

The biggest issue I am having now, is getting back into the Python-style of coding. Ruby and Python are fairly similar… and very much different from Java and C++ which I am more familiar with. There are also a few speedbumps I am noticing when working on my first Rails project, but I hope to overcome them soon.