Locomotive

Locomotive is a Ruby on Rails environment for Mac os X 10.3 or later. It includes Ruby, the lighttpd web server, `SQLite, and `MySQL and `PostgreSQL interfaces. It is self-contained: It requires no installation and does not conflict with any other Ruby installations you may have.

This time I used Apple's Rails Tutorial, with much more success than I had with an older (and severely outdated) tutorial.

In order to be able to follow Apple's tutorial as closely as possible, I first downloaded and installed `MySQL. I started with Managing MySQL on Mac OS X, which brought me to Marc Liyanage's MySQL installation instructions, which worked perfectly. (I didn't install the MySQLStartupItem.pkg, however.)

On Marc Liyanage's recommendation, I also got the MySQL Administrator and YourSQL applications.

One thing that I found was that the installation is such that the Rails commands only work from Locomotive's Applications --> Open Terminal window. Oddly, the `MySQL commands do not work from this window; but I opened another Terminal window from this one (with cmd-N), and `MySQL commands do work from it.)

The expenses/app/config/database.yml file that Rails generated was not exactly as shown in the tutorial, but it works.

I've also been trying TextMate, and I can see why Rubyists like it so much. It's a very powerful little text editor.