I went to David Heinemeier Hansson's tutorial on Ruby on Rails this afternoon. David's first application in Ruby was Basecamp. He'd had 5 years of PHP experience and didn't even consider himself a programmer. He claims that even people who aren't language nuts can love Ruby and he created Rails to make it easy. (BTW, I brushed up my Ruby last week by reading "Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby (with cartoon foxes)". Recommended.

David's calls a "blogging package" the "hello world" program of the Internet age and he intends to create one today in the tutorial. The blog will have posts (natch), comments, ... What's needed?

• Ruby 1.8.2
• Database (pick one of six)
• The RubyGems package manager (like CPAN, maybe?)
• A few Gems, like rails

We're going to stat from a scaffold, build a domain model, and manage authentication. Rails comes with a program, called 'rails' that builds scaffolding, including directory structures and files, for a project. It's not so much about creating boilerplate classes as it is just creating the file structure for the application. Later tools will use these assumptions.