Without doubt the easiest way to work with me on this project is to duplicate my environment. However, since all my work is done on Ubuntu Linux that is not costly and who knows you may even like it! I would recommend a virtual machine if you do not want to change your main operating system I use VmWare's Fusion product for Mac but there are free or cheap virtualization products for all major platforms. If you want to be a developer these days having a working virtualization environment is almost a must anyway, unless you like living in a room full of actual machines.

Once you have a working virtualization environment just install the latest desktop version of Ubuntu and setup a basic LAMP setup (Linux,Apache,MySql,PHP). You will also need ruby1.8 and rubygems and a package called build-essential from there you will install all required rails components via gem. Below are a list of important gems to install:

• rails version 2.3.5
• rake
• rspec
• rack
• actionmailer
• actionpack
• activerecord
• activeresource
• activesupport
• mongrel
• tiny_mce
• will_paginate
• rmagick - requires imageMagick and probably the dev packages for it
• mysql - requires libmysqlclient-dev
• capistrano - not needed unless you are me and need to push the latest version up to the server.

Some of these will be installed automatically as dependencies of the major components like rails. For help with gem commands simply type gem on the command line and help will appear.

Finally, while this is more a matter of personal preference it should be known that I use Netbeans IDE as my editing and development environment I have found it to be an excellent rails development environment and it will be the easiest and most natural to use this with my source code. Netbeans can be installed through apt or any of the other software tools included with Ubuntu with just a couple of clicks. You will however have to add the ruby plugin from the tools menu of Netbeans to use all the rails features Netbeans is capable of. You should be able to download a working copy of StudyWorx from http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tompossin-gmail/studyworx/trunk/files using bzr and simply click to open the netbeans project file and you should be on your way.

It may take a few hours(or so) to get the above working correctly but once you do you will not regret it. I find it very, very nice to have a dedicated and isolated development environment on my computer.

If you already have a working rails set-up and an editor you like all you need to get started developing StudyWorx is Bazaar. Bazaar is a version control system that you will need to use the Launchpad.net repository. Bazaar is available for nearly all Operating Systems here.

StudyWorx uses the excellent Wicked PDF Plug-in for rendering html into PDF files. Instructions for setting this up are found here.

The goals for StudyWorx is to provide a complete online school environment for the inductive study of the Bible. Although as the project matures it is becoming clear that it could just as easily become a full blown generic online education framework.

Currently StudyWorx is at the working prototype stage. Most of the framework and basic design is in place and functioning but there is a long way to go before I would call it a beta release. If you are a Rails developer or a graphic web designer there are still plenty of things that you could take on and call your own in this project!