Hi All,
I’ve arrived at the door of Ruby! I’m a complete noob to Ruby and RoR
and looking for some high level advice on things to look at.
I’m an experienced .NET system architect and PRISM/WPF/C# developer by
day and have picked up a job that basically suits RoR, Postgres set up
over the normal .NET SQLServer route I would take.
The whole MVC thing is very familiar as I make extensive use of
MVVM/MVC/MVP/IoC with WPF & PRISM. What’s going to hold me back
initially is syntax and learning Ruby. I got the whole dev environment
set up in a flash and have been playing about and doing some hello
worlds 
The application I’m looking to build comprises of a highly dynamic Rails
web site (jQuery, AJAX), a public HTTP API (XML/JSON) to feed the web
site and third party apps and of course the database. All access to the
database is handled by the API. Facebook/Native/OAuth and authorisation
and authentication. Temporary tokenised credentials for 3rd party apps.
There will also be a mobile app (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) and a
desktop widget on the Adobe Air platform further down the line.
The application will almost certainly end up on Heroku and possibly
using Mashery to manage the API and Heroku Postgres database hosting
solution.
Sorry for the waffle but though it pertinent to include as much
background on the scenario as possible.
The question is what gems or libraries should I look at that go some way
to providing some base functionality into a rails app that this type of
application could benefit from?
There is no point reinventing the wheel when someone has already tackled
some of the common problems I’ll face.
I’ll be using ActiveModel over ActiveRecord for the models as these will
be sent straight to the public API for persistence.
Any recommendation would be great. Good article links would be great as
well.
Looking forward to getting to know the group!
Jam