I’m comfortable with Javascript - I think I’m fairly accomplished with it - so I got it done, and it worked. It was only then that I thought ‘I think Rails does Ajax too’. Does it ever! Ten minutes, and I had a Rails Ajax version working (a lot less than my own time, even with my boiler-plate code) and, and this is the best bit, much more readable code! That’s what I call a win. link_to_remote was the useful function in question, and my call is:
link_to_remote( "Show",
:url => { :action => "show_small", :id => game.id },
:update => "js_board",
:before => "document.getElementById('js_board').style.left = get_x(this);
document.getElementById('js_board').style.top = get_y(this)",
:complete => "document.getElementById('js_board').style.visibility = 'visible'" )

My biggest complaint with Rails so far is a lack of books and documentation. I mean, the API docs are pretty good, but I’d like to see more example, more tutorials, and a structured thing like a book would be wonderful.

So, what have I learnt? Well, I’ve used routes.rb to set up the default page for the site. You can also ditch that index.html file from public in your application too. I think I’ve figured out how change passwords in the security thing, which is a bit involved, so sometime I’ll post the code.

Partials - annoyingly - don’t have a ‘general’ folder. You can create one, but you have to specify it each time you call a partial. That sucks a bit.

I built a lot of the user admin stuff - login, signup, etc.. It was made very easy by the Login Generator. Updating users and stuff - well, that was only a slight change to the normal scaffold. The big change was updating the password - but even that wasn’t too bad.

All in all, still impressed by how much you can get done in a short time with Rails.

One thing I’d like to figure out is how to do a persistent Login cookie for Rails. I don’t mind having my session deleted, but having authenticated that user, I’d like to not have to do it again the next time they visit the site.