Improved Scaffolding for Ruby on Rails

A reader, Ken Shaffer, emailed with an issue he had getting the example code (above) to work with his version of PostgreSQL. I initially suggested he try it with MySQL just to get things going but, to Ken's credit, he soldiered on and sorted out his problems. Here's a copy of Ken's e-mail to me letting me know what he did. Both Ken and I hope this information will be of use to other readers experiencing similar problems.

----------- start of Ken's email -----------
Hi Paul,
I did succeed in getting a compatible set of gems and activescaffold
for running the soccer club demo. Open source is so dynamic
that it's sometimes tricky getting compatible versions of things --
my hat's off to the people putting Linux distributions together.

For the Ubuntu 8.10 rails 2.1 (rake, rubygems) installed via the
Synaptic Package Manager, use the ruby_pg gem instead of the postgres
gem.
I understand the postgres gem has not been supported since 2006.
Also avoid the pg gem, which is not necessary. The activescaffold
install now needs to pick out the rails 2.1 (previous) version.
The following failed to get the rails 2.1 version (got the default 2.2
ver):
script/plugin install \
git://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold.git \
-r rails-2.1
Found a code snippit (attached below) which worked.

Another (more painful) approach which worked is to update all the
rails 2.1.0 versions to the 2.2.2 versions (and also update rubygems).
The default activescaffold install will then work.

The below code snippit succeeded in getting the activescaffold version
compatible with rails 2.1

from http://code.google.com/p/activescaffold/issues/detail?id=626
Comment 1 by mr.gaffo, Nov 18, 2008

---snip -----
Either (in vendor plugin):
git clone git://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold.git
[cd to active_scaffold ]
git checkout origin/rails-2.1
rm -rf .git
Or, pull down the newest rails-2.1 tarball from github.
--snip------

Again, thanks for a great article. It was the combination of postgresql
and rails that caught my interest. Feel free to pass along any info, no
attribution needed.
Ken
----------- end of Ken's email -----------

Thanks for that, Ken!

Paul.