NetBeans, JRuby and Rails 3 – How to make it work (Tutorial)

The best tutorials derive from the worst experiences. I’m not in any way trying to claim the (or any…) title, BUT, when it comes to NetBeans support for Rails 3 (and someone who wouldn’t just want to create an application without using “Generate…” [errrr… WHAT?]) things can get messy.

So, today, in a need to help some students go through the “Agile Web Development in Rails – Fourth Edition” tutorial, we came across a major issue: NetBeans 6.9.1 (and I guess any NetBeans 6.9 plus, version) allows to Upgrade the JRuby supported Ruby-on-Rails Framework to version 3 (version 3.0.0 or as of today 3.0.1) but impressingly, cannot use the Framework properly.

How would one go about (1) Creating a new Ruby-on-Rails project in Netbeans, (2) Generating a Scaffold, (3) Connecting to an SQLite3 file-based Database (I’ll pass on MySQL for now…) and then (4) Migrating to the current DB Version and (5) Running the Project? Read on…