Derailed

Posted at 23:58 on 03 March 2008

This evening, I decided to have another go at Ruby on Rails. I’ve dipped my toe in the water a couple of times but I’ve never managed to spend more than an evening or two on it so far, and I thought it was about time I learned it properly. So I get out my copy of Agile Web Development with Rails and start to work my way through it.

Only to find that putting scaffold :model in your controller — one of the biggest selling points of Rails, and one of the first things that all the tutorials teach you — no longer works in version 2.0. Turns out that it has been relegated to a plugin, which doesn’t work without a second plugin, which I couldn’t get to install.

The new scaffolding doesn’t do what I want it to either. I just wanted to scaffold a new controller and associated views that would work on an existing model. The new approach only allows you to create your scaffolding in tandem with a new model, which is not what I wanted.

This does not inspire confidence. If the upgrade to 2.0 breaks one of the very first things that Rails n00bs like me have to learn, I shudder to think what it does to more advanced functionality.

Can somebody please explain to me why Rails is supposed to be so cool?