So it’s been ages since I’ve posted here, partly because of lack of time, partly due to apathy, and partly because I’ve just been too lazy to get off my ass and get stuff done.

So last night at the FV.rb meeting, after hearing @milesforrest talked a bit about a project idea, I said something to the affect of, “lets just start going, code that puppy!”

The idea was simple, first step was to set up simple user registration system. Devise Warden was the choice at the moment to use, so we created the base rails app, and ran through the readme and….

Failed.

Complete and utter failure. The simple step 2 of 3 was “add this line into your config/application.rb” and we ended up working for maybe another 30 minutes to get it working before we were going to be kicked out and had to head home.

And that brings me (slowly) back around to the title. Rails purports itself to be quick and easy and “hey look, just create a scaffold and all this stuff just works and it all is just built for you”, but the real reality is, or seems to be, that first of all, no one uses scaffolding for anything other than demos, and secondly, the ease of use that Rails presents itself with seems to be not that available to the newbies (such as myself) in the form of bad documentation (no slight on the Devise guys, it’s more than likely that they were writing towards people who actually had a iota of clue as to what they were doing), not knowing enough about Rails itself, or the components sucked in by the gem (in this case, ActionMailer), or a host of other things.

For the newbies though it’s a rude awakening when to jump into a (very) small project “to learn” and get stopped basically at step one.

Still, it is a learning experience, and given the time I’m sure we would have figured it out, or tried any of the myriad of other web authentication gems and gotten one of them working. I’m glad it happened in fact, if only to see that it’s not only me that has these things happen!