I am starting my first non-trivial Rails application (finally!), and I quickly encountered the common situation in which you want to assign hierarchical subject categories to an entity. I also wanted to do this within the context of using RESTful controllers in Rails. Designing RESTful controllers is a relatively new concept to me, and its a relatively new feature in Rails itself. All in all, implementing this was remarkably fast and smooth, true to Rails’ reputation, although there were a few minor things along the way that weren’t immediately obvious to me. So, because this is probably such a common scenario, I decided to recreate the steps I took to implement this for others like me who are very new to Rails.

In a previous post, I went through my thought process for choosing Aptana/RadRails (on the Eclipse platform) as my Ruby on Rails(RoR) IDE. Well, that didn’t last long.

In a recent episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass suggested that we are now living through a “Golden Age” of television, a time when the major networks are responding to increasing competition with greater experimentation and better quality programming overall. He suggests that we may not recognize that we are living through this era until after it is over, and we are left to ponder fond memories.

I suggest that we are experiencing a similar “Golden Age” of Web application development. I think its been going on for some time now, taking shape in a recognizable form in 2005 and really hitting its stride in 2006. And, I suspect it may have peaked already and that in a few years, some of us may look back on this time and romanticize it.