Ah! so that’s what happened…

I’ve spent most of the afternoon re-aquainting myself with Mac programming idioms, and generally getting myself into a veritable froth of possibilityand over-imagination about the CoreAnimation technologies.

Outside of that, I finally backtracked into the world of Ruby on Rails to figure out why all the examples in the books were completely screwed up for me. It turns out that a basic stepping stone in most of those tutorials is the “dynamic scaffolding” bit. In the world of the Django frameworks, this is sort of a cross between the Admin functionality that’s implied from all models there and a “insta-crud” framework that’s for a general user’s benefit.

Regardless, when I got to that point in the rails world, the demos just all broke and went to hell – and as a rank newbie, I hadn’t a freakin’ clue of what was going on and how to fix it.Today I finally pinned it down. Taking some time away from it gave me a little perspective (as in I wasn’t muttering about how this rails thing sucks) and I got the skinny on the ruby forums. In a nutshell, dynamic scaffolding doesn’t exist in Rails 2.x – but you can generate a static scaffolding with rails generator code.

I’m certainly not quite used to “script/generate …” which seems to frequent the rails world of newbie examples. It does get a hell of a lot done for you, but I sort of feel like I’m missing the boat on what’s actually happening and what the defaults/conventions of rails are. Just working through it, I guess, is the best way to learn.