Riding the Rails

So I got Ruby on Rails installed and went through the first tutorial to get a mini blog application up and running. Seems very nice and it was very easy to get up and running, but might take a little while to get used to since it's very different to Java!

If any very n00b Ruby on Rails developers come across this, starting points you should firstly think about getting your head around are as follows:

• MVC - Learn what it means, how they components hook together and how it works in Rails. Personally this is one area I need to look into more since I am not used to splitting up code into the MVC model, though I think this is a very good ideal to stick to.
• REST - Everything around Rails appears to be RESTful. If you don't know what this means, go look it up and understand what it means to be a RESTful application. In very basic terms, REST is the idea of sending HTTP requests to the server (such as GET, POST, DELETE and PUT) to different URLs in order to get responses. 
• Routes - Web Applications in Rails have a routing file, which tells your applications what certain links map to. Firstly, I think this is incredibly useful! It means that when making any communication between client and server (post request, ajax, hyperlink, etc) you can just reference a route in your routing file. I only understand the very basics of this but I can see this being a very helpful part of Rails. 

The more I've been looking into this, the more I've realised how out of the game I have been when it comes to  web development! So much has changed since the last time I really made any kind of website! One of the hardest tasks I foresee is getting used to the Ruby syntax and also learning how to write HTML5 code, heavy on Javascript. Once I have the knowledge of what libraries are out there and how modern websites work now, then hooking it all in and deploying it in Rails should be very easy.

Anyway - to start with - I need to come up with some ideas and designs for a website. The technology can wait and for the mean time I think I need to do some serious reading!