Hobo Application Builder for Rails

I was roaming the interwebs seeing what was new in the world of improved generator scripts and scaffolding in Railsland and found Hobo. I’m completely blown away so far.

Having come from doing web development in .NET or Java, Rails in comparison is a huge shortcut to getting something up and running.  Hobo is an additional layer of get-it-up-fast goodness that’s just friggin incredible.  I came home from visiting family today and had checked out the introductory video on the Hobo site and came home anxious to try it.

I’m running Rails 2.3.8, which is newer than the latest version of Hobo so I was a bit concerned about compatibility.  To test it out, I have been wanting to put together an application for our enterprise to keep a vault of all of our business ideas.  Longer term I was thinking of making a Digg like feature so everyone can vote up or down the ideas, challenge monetization schemes, etc. and may the best ideas win.

First things first, using Hobo I made a simple app that allows users to register and create business idea records in the database.  It took a grand total of 5 minutes including bathroom breaks.

Here’s the command line action from start to finish to create my initial ideavault application:

sudo gem install hobo

hobo ideavault

script/generate hobo_model_resource businessidea name:string description:text revenuemodel:text technolgysummary:text

script/generate hobo_migration

The Hobo migration script has a couple of questions which I answered as described in the tutorial.  Then I just fired up the server and my hobo app magically appeared…

Hobo uses it’s default templates to give the initial style to the pages and is easily changed.  The first user you create is an admin user unless you modify the code that does that.  I went ahead and created myself as the first user and clicked on the Businessideas tab (I’m actually regretting choosing that as the name now that I see it on the UI, but I’m sure I can change it easily enough on the tab).

My new Hobo app cheerfully welcomed me as a new user and I was able to create new business ideas to my heart’s content.

Hobo created all of the infrastructure for user creation and authentication.  The Account menu provides the ability to change passwords, etc.

I can’t wait to find out what else Hobo can do.  I downloaded the free PDF books from the Hobo site.  I expected them to have been cobbled together in a weekend over many beers, but these are market quality, professional publications.

I’ll continue to flesh out this application using Hobo and will post my adventures.  In the mean time I encourage any Rails developer to check this one out.