Circle of Confusion

I've been trying to learn Ruby on Rails ever since this tutorial was posted in onlamp.com. Everytime I didn't get far because of one problem or another with setting up the enviroment under WinXP (Ruby, Gem, Rails, MySql). Then I saw the link to Rolling with Ruby on InstantRails. Ths solved the installation problem and I can finish the tutorial. But I don't like developement tools used in the tutorial. So I set out to find my ideal Rails development environment by doing this same tutorial several time using various setup. I determined the best is RadRails. So I try to do the tutorial from menory. Really, I haven't learn Ruby and I'm doing Rails. Seems a little backward. Then I run into this:



I have no clue what was happening. Since I did the tutorial so many times successfully, I know I was guilty of some mistakes. But what did I do wrong? Is this not like be your own psychics? After a long chase late night without success, I went to sleep at 2am because I was a zombie. Then this morning found the problem and it in here somewhere:

class RecipeController < ApplicationController
  scaffold :recipe

  def nrw
    recipe = Recipe.new
    @categories = Category.find_all
  end
  
  def create
     @recipe = Recipe.new(@params['recipe'])
     @recipe.date = Date.today
     if @recipe.save
      redirect_to :action => 'list'
     else
      render_action 'new'
     end
  end  
    
  def list
    @recipes = Recipe.find_all
  end
  
  def list_debug
    @recipes = Recipe.find_all
  end
  
  def edit
    @recipe = Recipe.find(@params["id"])
    @categories = Category.find_all
  end
end

Viola!


ah ha, I found the mistake and It's a typo: I mistyped new as nrw.

I'm begining to learn Rails after ten so many years doing Java. I've forgot C++, many assembly. Just mostly dry confused J2EE. I wonder if this old dog can learn a new trick?

I tried many configurations in my search for my ideal development environment (I use a WinXP laptop):

- VMWare under WinXP running Linux doing rails development there
- Cygwin as a Unix shell to run rails command lines, various editor to do editing. I tied jEdit, notepad, Cream. While setup Cygwin, I discover rails app cannot connect to MySql, after some search around, I found out database.yml cannot use localhost, muust use 127.0.0.1 which for a tcp/ip connection.
- RadRails: at first creating an empty Rails project just do nothing. No error message or any indication what went wrong. Hmm, running generator show what's wrong: no Ruby.exe found. Ah, PATH problem. Onece I setup my environment variable PATH to contain ruby.exe, RadRails comes to life. Everything works!