I’ve been working on a Ruby on Rails application for the last week or so, having never really worked with it before, beyond making some minor edits to some .rhtml files.

It’s an interesting environment, and I can definitely see it’s place in the developer’s toolbox. It’s great if you have to get something up and running quickly, and if you don’t have the sort of heavy business-tier requirements that are the bread-and-butter of Java / J2EE / Spring.

The interactvie Ruby environment, IRB, is very useful when learning Ruby, but doesn’t easily let you interact with a Rails application.

The Rails Console turns out to be just the thing for this. You can execute “script/console” in your application’s main directory, and exercise the classes in your application. Very handy!

Amy Fuchs, a.k.a. Amy Hoy has a great overview on her blog.