Hi,
although I have about 25 years in the software/IT business as a Federal Government employee, somehow I have avoided Web development all this time... until now... I have an application at work that I want to tackle, and decided it would be a fantastic time to learn Ruby and RoR - for my continuing adult education...
I was first exposed to Ruby at an Open Source conference in Portland 2 years ago - saw the PickAxe authors give a brief intro to Ruby and RoR... that was very exciting/stimulating/interesting... Bought the PickAxe book but only read a portion of it and never used it... Been doing quite abit of perl programming lately, but not Web apps...
I recently bought and am going through the Simply Rails 2 book... like what I am reading/seeing, trying to understand/etc... although it is abit daunting due to my very limited knowledge of Web programming/etc (no prior PHP, JavaScript, etc experience)...
At any rate, that is all background stuff...
What I am wondering is if anybody has built a ??gem?? that gives you most of what you need to get a user front-end to a database application in place...
What I picture is something that first asks the user which table (if there are multiple ones that are linked up/ready to be used in the RoR - that is defined in a yml file, I guess) to use - from a drop down list... this could also default to a commonly use one, etc...
Next the user is given a choice of first (most popularly used - known in advance by the programming/me) column in the table to retrieve from - using a drop down list... Based on the characteristics of the field, the user is given choices of operator - for int/number columns choices like "> , <, >=, <=, etc", for dates choices like "within a range, before, after"... the user is given a field to enter their criteria... now the user can execute that retrieval, OR - they can choose to add to the retrieval - with an AND or an OR - I guess another checkbox, and/or dropdown menu... And they go ahead and build a query that way (a column at a time/etc), and execute it... they can modify the entries in this query and/or save the query... It would allow for parenthesized booleans - to allow the user to build advanced queries...
This seems to be very basic database retrieval stuff - and I am guessing that others have implemented something that gives you this functionality already and would prevent me from reinventing the wheel to get this sort of useful/slick interface using RoR...
So that is my question to the group...
The other question is if the Aptana Studio and RadRails (free versions) are a good/recommended IDE to use... Or should I use Eclipse (already have a version downloaded) with the RadRails plugIN? I like the idea of IDEs - and had a small bit of experience (mostly in a Java course I took) using Eclipse with Java in my last job.... And before that, decades ago - Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C...
thanks TONs for any assistance!!, Southside_Bruce