Ok, probably a lot of things….but this is a tech blog and this is certainly a tech subject so it does seem appropriate.

I don’t have a strong background in web development. I have had passing familiarity with various technologies over the years, but nothing really in depth; ie, I can put together a pretty mean HTML web page (never used the <blink> tag…..honestly!)

Getting Started
The first step in this process is to set up your environment which is no small task (made much harder by my ISP who has shaped me back to 64Kbps after I expended my paltry GB allowance for the month……but that is another blog post entirely so we won’t go into that).

Setting up the environment requires a few applications which are mostly open source. These include:

The Ruby Interpreter
Pretty simple, visit the following website and then following the bouncing ball (be sure to install all available options): http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller

The Rails Framework
After the Ruby Interpreter has done its bit you can open a Windows Command prompt and type the following to install the Rails Framework

gem install rails -r -y

A valid Internet connection is all that is needed and the rest is done for you. If you are familiar with Linux type package managers such as RPM, that is pretty much what is happening here.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
The book I am using to learn this subject uses a product called RadRails. To make life as simple as possible I will stick to that environment until I find my way around a little more. However, in the interests of vendor neutrality, there are many different IDE applications available. This article will give you a few options or your good friend Google might also help.

MySQL and all its bits
Haven’t got to this stage yet (thank you once again ISP with small download limit), but here is the link for sake of completion. Having worked with MySQL previously, it takes some configuration so I will devote a post to the nuances of the install later, http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql

So that is pretty much where I stand at the moment. Sitting here waiting for my IDE to finish downloading. Stay tuned for more RoR run and games later.