If you're planning to develop an application for your department and want it to interact with UW-Eau Claire services such as Central Authentication Service, we strongly recommend developing using Ruby On Rails. The information on this page will show you how to get the necessary tools installed on your workstation.
Process
You'll develop your application entirely on your own machine, using the built-in web and database servers provided by the Rails framework. You should be in constant communication with Web Development while you develop your application so that you can avoid hassles when it comes time to bring your application into production. You'll check your application into a Git or Subversion repository and provide us a URL for the repository. We'll review your code and place it into production.
Setting up a windows development environment
Ruby
Download Ruby 1.8.6 from
and install it to the default location of c:\ruby
Next, you need to download and install the Development Kit. Grab a copy of 7zip from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sevenzip/7z465.exe
and use it to extract the Development Kit to c:\ruby. (Place the bin and devkit folders into the c:\ruby folder.
SQLite3
Download SQlite3 - http://sqlite.org/sqlitedll-3_6_23_1.zip
and extract sqlite3.dll into the c:\ruby\bin folder.
Rails
Open a command prompt and type
gem install rake rails sqlite3-ruby mysql --no-ri --no-rdoc
SQL Server Support
To connect to SQL Server, you'll need to install these libraries:
Open a command prompt and type
gem install ruby-odbc
gem install activerecord-sqlserver-adapter
You'll then need to create a user DSN to connect to SQL Server. Contact LTS Web Development for access to SQL Server.
Version Control
We use Subversion for version control at UW-Eau Claire. However, the Rails ecosystem is built on Git. You'll need Git to install many popular plugins for Rails.
Git: http://msysgit.googlecode.com/files/Git-1.7.0.2-preview20100309.exe
Install this and be sure to choose the option "Run Git from Windows Command Prompt" rather than "Use git-bash"
Subversion: http://subversion.tigris.org/files/documents/15/46485/Setup-Subversion-1.6.4.msi
Install his to the default location
Creating your First Application
Create the folder c:\rails on your computer. Open a command prompt and type
mkdir c:\rails
Then type
cd \rails
to move into that folder
Create your first Rails project like this:
rails my_test_project
When that finishes, type
cd my_test_project
to change into your application's folder.
To create a model, database table, and an interface to create, read, update, and delete elements, type this command at the command prompt, assuming you're in the c:\rails\my_test_project folder:
ruby script/generate scaffold projects name:string description:text active:boolean hours:integer
Then type
rake db:migrate
to create the local database and create the projects table
Then run
ruby script/server
and navigate to http://localhost:3000/projects
You can now create new projects, edit them, review them, and delete them. This is just a simple example of how you can quickly use Rails to start prototyping your project and test that everything is working correctly.
Scaffolding applications is not a good approach for production work, but it does show you how things work together with Rails.
IDEs
Aptana Studio is free and is available at http://www.radrails.org/3/
RubyMine is $99 and is available at http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/
NetBeans Ruby Edition is available at http://netbeans.org/downloads/index.html and is free.
