You've no doubt heard about Ruby on Rails (RoR) by now. It's a full-stack Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating web applications using the Ruby programming language. RoR adheres to the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle and uses the dynamic nature of Ruby and the idea of convention over configuration to reduce duplication and code line-count without sacrificing maintainability or scalability. In short, it's a Good Thing! Even better news: If you're on OS X, it couldn't be easier to get up and running with RoR thanks to a one-click installer and administration application called Locomotive. Here is a quick tutorial to get you started.

• Download Locomotive and install it by opening the image file and dragging the application to your Applications folder.
• Run Locomotive and click the + button in the control bar. Select "Create New" from the button's menu.
• Give your application a name and select the directory (folder) that Locomotive should create it in.
• Press the Create button

That's it, you've created your first rails application!

To run the server for your application, select the application's name in the applications list in Locomotive and press the Run button. Now go to http://localhost:Port (where port is the port that is listed next to the application's name in Locomotive) and you will see the default Rails welcome screen.

One caveat: If you're using MYSQL via MAMP, you need to add the following line "socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock" to your database configuration file (config/database.yml) when working with RoR. That one caught me out until I found the note in Locomotive's help files.

To learn more about rails, check out the tutorials on the Ruby on Rails web site.

So how does this all apply to Flex/Flash development? Well, MidnightCoders has a Flash Remoting solution for Ruby on Rails called WebORB for Ruby on Rails that supports both AMF0 and AMF3...

The Creating applications with RoR on OS X article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.