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As of this evening I have re-done Kotoba using ActiveScaffold.  I have also updated the application to use Rails version 2.2. All in all, I am extremely happy with the level of sophistication that ActiveScaffold allows me.  At this point the entire application is created via declarations; there is not a single line of code, as it were.

Some minor issues cropped up on migrating to Rails 2.2 and ActiveScaffold, though.  First, the mysql gem is no longer a part of Rails; this requires a separate install.

$ sudo gem install mysql -- 

--with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

You will need to ensure you are using the 32-bit version of MySQL 5.x, though.  Currently the gem does not know how to support x64.  Sadly.

Additionally, ActiveScaffold appears to cause some interesting issues with DB migrations.  At present, the easiest work-around is to update your Rail apps impacted environment(s) (e.g. config/environments/production.rb) with the following:

config.cache_classes = (File.basename($0) 

== "rake" && ARGV.include?("db:migrate")) ?  false : true
 

I did try some various localization ideas, but none of them as of yet have yielded much fruit.  The most promising is Rails upcoming support of i8ln.  For now I will continue to focus more on functionality till localization is more readily accessible.

Kotoba is very much a work-in-progress Japanese vocabulary system for students learning Japanese.  While there are a lot of other pieces of software out there for studying foreign languages, even specifically Japanese, none of them are, in my opinion, functionally complete.  

This project encompasses my own years of studying Japanese, incorporating approaches and techniques that I have found useful.  At present I am targeting myself as the sole user; however, as time progresses I hope to include community-based features.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestions or ideas.