Would Ruby on Rails be appropriate for this Foreign Language project?
- by Lynne Overesch-Maister
I'm a Spanish professor & computer groupie. About 15 years ago, I authored in HyperCard a series of verb conjugation programs that are now completely out of date with respect to System OS X. I would like to redo these programs myself because I had a lot of fun doing them last time (mostly I coded while my son played in Leaps and Bounds, you know, one of those places where parents take their kids & let them run wild through the tubes...).
Colleagues have mentioned using Flash, Director, and various other solutions, but I saw a presentation on RoR at our SIDLIT conference today, and was inspired. I will be parsing and comparing strings (and there are other features on top of that, but that is the main one), "adding" strings relationally indexed in some kind of database(s). It will also have to handle various foreign characters (accents, upside down question marks, etc.). On top of the main process of the program, it will have to provide a practice vs. test mode, keep track of specific answers as well as totals right/wrong, and print a report. Would this be either easier and/or more efficiently done in RoR than in other languages. I am pretty sure that it will work on a Microsoft server, right? Because I think that is where most of our stuff is. I would be programming either on a Mac or a PC, whichever you think is easier.
So, in summary, is RoR the way for me to go with this project? If I have some (little) experience programming in Hypercard and C, should I be able to pick RoR up fairly quickly? What things will I need to start (I already saw something called Redhills foreign key migration plugin, which I assume would be beneficial)? I still have my old scripts from hypercard, however what I would really like to do is to combine all six of my former tense-specific programs into one larger program. I figure that it wouldn't be too hard to reference the individual tenses in some way--could that be a class? Many thanks for any help you can give me on this forum.
